Crying on Alma Mater's Shoulder

Of all the apologies I owe, the greatest belongs to my mother and father. No parent should have to spend Family Weekend hearing, as if played on a loop, “Remember when I called you crying last week? I was sitting over there.” I can only imagine what it’s like to hear one’s own child moan in agony for weeks on end, particularly when it is less for the absence of her mother and father than for that of a teenage boy’s affection.

Like many couples who venture into the immediately maturing (or immaturing) territory of collegiate life, my romance with my high-school sweetheart came crashing down. I was the victim of the catastrophe, which caught me without warning and left me grief-ravaged and helpless for someone who, as I learned in my first weeks on Barnard’s feminism-breeding grounds, I was far too dependent upon in the first place. Depleted and exhausted, I telephoned home to Houston with the news that Barnard’s excessive tuition had purchased nothing but devastation, save ten free sessions at the counseling center.

It’s amazing the lengths to which a first-year roommate will go, perhaps because every student faces the threat of cataclysmic homesickness, or simply because the thought of dining in Hewitt alone is even worse than eating there with a friend. Some of my fondest memories as a first-year are those nights my roommate and I shared cartons of fried rice and made rash, sweeping generalizations about men (which it seemed even longtime feminists were wont to do). Still, when more than a week had passed and the pangs of romantic rejection failed to lift, I felt it necessary to surrender the room for a few hours and seek solace elsewhere on campus.

That’s how I began my bleary-eyed tour of the Columbia campus. For a few hours each day I packed a purse full of Kleenex and set out to find someplace scenic to stretch my legs, unwind, and open the floodgates. I set out for a different location with each episode, in part because I wanted to avoid seeing the same faces twice and in part because it seemed right to venture to every corner. I never once doubted what would happen on those excursions before I made them, perhaps because I’ve always been something of an Olympic crier (“I think we should break up” sent me straight to Duane Reade for waterproof mascara; too cheap for two-ply tissues, I’m still indebted to that roommate).

Day after sullen day I staked out a locale, set up shop with my tissues, and allowed myself to indulge in my emotional catharsis. Each excursion led me to a new corner of the Morningside Heights campus: perched high on the steps of the Low Library, admiring the view through wet eyes; cross-legged on the fountains, watching the passers-by on College Walk; beneath the blue arch in front of Wallach, relocating its lunch patrons; straddling Amsterdam traffic on the bridge that weds East Campus with Columbia; stretched out under a pear tree on Barnard’s Lehman Lawn, and one evening, caught in its late-night sprinklers.

I cried in so many places during those first few months that I was able to string each location together on a tour over Parents’ Weekend, a survey of both sides of Broadway, the geography of unrequited love. And while I sensed my parents’ alarm, sharing the University and each of my havens with them seemed only natural. Only then did it become clear that the heartache had slowly begun to subside, and what would remain was my affection for these buildings and lawns, the rhythm of its students, the school’s history, and the enduring feeling that although its visitors had suffered fates as bad as and worse than mine, Columbia would, quite simply, get over it.

A good friend of mine at the University of Texas asked me recently whether, given the opportunity, I would choose to repeat that first semester of college. He and I agreed that the idea of reliving those months is simply laughable, and while I will never have to endure the notorious hazing that goes on in a Longhorn frat house, I will patently assert that I have done myself as much coronary damage as any member of the Sigma Alpha Mu pledge class. You couldn’t pay me enough to live those months over again—and I mean that.

Still, the value of those hours I spent tucked in the arm of the Alma Mater having a good cry are not to be discounted. Today there is one place on campus that I never fail to pass without remembering those first languorous, heartbroken months. What comes flooding back, though, is not the pain of rejection but the feeling of familiarity with the red bricks and grey stone in which I had gradually begun to take comfort. By the time the leaves turned, the Morningside campus had shared in my grief with the intimacy of an old friend. Months of crying on its shoulder had ultimately made it mine.

The author is a sophomore at Barnard College. West Side Stories runs every Wednesday.