Curiosity ~ Lucidity ~ Humanity
We storm the beachhead of the Harper Hall dormitory in beat-up, rust-covered, sputtering Pintos, in borrowed pickups and leased U-hauls, in the shiny red Italian sportscars our daddies unwisely bought us - indeed in any manner of conveyance available to the first-year students of Nebraska. We flood the staging ground of the parking lot, the drop zone of the lobby, and the rally point of the elevators with our boxes, our knocking-at-the-door-of-adulthood, please-God-no-pimples-today bodies, our raging hormones, and our yes-I'm-grown-up-now minds.
Our newly issued room keys twist just slightly too loudly in squeaky door locks, ambushing our half-naked, still asleep, newly assigned roommates with a sonic assault upon their still hungover ears and still aching heads. Yet we bond with them immediately, our decreed-by-campus-living-brothers and sisters-in-arms in our holy crusade of becoming. We shake hands, we laugh, we assess our new comrades, deciding exactly how much use each will be in the battle to come.
We survey our dorm room barracks, our 16-by-24 fortresses of independent living, our monuments to our personal declarations of independence, and then, Iwo Jima-style, we raise the flag of mine-not-mom-and-dads. We send our parents hurrying along, those drill sergeants who raised us, those imposers of rules that are no more, for there is new life to be lived, new selfhood to awaken.
That night, we launch our first salvos with all of our weapons – our purchased-with-fake ID vodka, our gas-station-vending-machine condoms, our over-priced-under-potent weed, our makeup and hair gel, and battle fatigues of denim, ripped t-shirts, or lace. We all get it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time tattoos, tokens of our togetherness, our belonging, our in-crowd-ness, because that’s what soldiers do. We vomit, ceremonially, enthusiastically, completing the right of passage with a solemn oath that we will never again drink orange vodka fizz.
We arm ourselves with overpriced textbooks, please-let-them-be-trendy backpacks, and feign serious looks. We wage war on our 100-level-prerequisite classes, with their oh-my-god-look-at-that-professors-jackets and the cute girls or boys (dealer’s choice) to “innocently” sit by. We follow our orders to the best of our abilities, our self-imposed imperatives to belong, to be popular, to fit in. We advance under the withering fire of lobbed grenades of syllabuses, exploding due dates, searing did-you-even-read-the-assignment questions, and the enemy-agent-gaze of teaching assistants. Yet we stagger forward, for all this is a small price to pay for the glory of beginnings.
We take our first casualties – the mid-term grades that policy dictates parental review, the dropouts, the marijuana arrests of those kids from another floor, the suddenly missed periods, and the visits to clinics. We mourn the totaled red sports cars and the motorcycles that spun out on dirt roads at eighty-three. We encounter our first traitors to the cause — the cheating boyfriends and girlfriends, the stolen bicycles, the fraternities and sororities that won’t let us pledge. But we soldier on, filled with the will to victory, because we are the survivors, the green berets of bluebooks and beer pong.
But we advance, never stopping, because it is who we are; it is what we do. We continually advance; we never retreat.
The blitzkrieg of the first semester ends inconclusively, with GPAs that are all right(ish), the once fireworks-and-always-and-forever-or-so-we-thought relationships that dissolve into obligation, becoming chore-like and ordinary, the poverty and ennui. But we advance, never stopping, because it is who we are; it is what we do.
It is only then that the true grind of war begins – the summer jobs, the good-luck-everpaying-it-off student loans, the bill collectors, the parental bailouts. The class after class, the test after test, the too-short semester breaks, half-a-year, half-a-year onward, into the valley of sameness, we ride by the hundreds. Eventually, we reach an armistice, a truce in the form of a diploma. We shake the hands thrust forth by the robed academics who in no way resemble Odin or Mars or any god of war, we fake-smile for the pictures, we throw our caps, and act surprised when gravity brings them crashing to earth. We party one last time and promise we'll always stay in touch in this new world, this statistically defined victory that feels like a surrender, like the end of spring, like the end of all the springs that will ever be.
We call it adulthood, and it is not what we thought it would be.
We don’t stay in touch.
The peace is long and brutal. We build monuments to our ambiguous victory in the form of houses, cars, and savings accounts. We take wives and husbands because the next generation of soldiers must spring forth from our battle-hardened loins, as we once did. We tolerate the enforcers of our obligations in our treaty with true adulthood, they who manifest as supervisors, bell-curve performance reviews, those human mile-markers in the post-war process of interviews, layoffs, and careers. We pay reparations in the form of bills, of college funds, of child support, both voluntary and not.
We watch time accelerate, evaporate, and wonder where our youth went.
But the war never stops. For one day, it is late summer again, and we bring our children in our electric cars, our twenty-year-old-on-the-second-too-expensive-battery hybrids, in the trucks that we borrow from our less-environmentally-conscious cousins, and we deposit them outside Harper Hall. We wonder whether we were ever really here and whether any of it ever really happened. We carry their boxes; we meet their sleeping new roommates; we put twenties in their pants pockets. We tell them we love them; we make them promise to call.
We say goodbye and realize that our war, whether it was a victory or a loss, lives only as history, as dim Polaroids in fading albums, as numbers in contact lists we never call, as memories that demonstrate their tenuous life by surfacing in unpredictable, possibly unreliable waves.
We realize it is their war now.
Perhaps they will even win.
Bio-Fragment: David Newkirk started his writing career as a lawyer. It took him thirty years to realize that no one wanted to read boring legal articles. When he retired, he decided to try his hand at fiction to keep his keyboard from feeling abandonment. Basically, he's happy writing anything that doesn't require footnotes and citations, and hopes you're happy reading it.