The College Apocalypses

I had just turned eighteen when the world ended. Weeks into my first year of college, planes slammed into the World Trade Center. An event momentous enough for my English professor to release class before it got started, before I knew what had happened. Back in the dorm, my roommate had at last set up the television that I’d been grateful he brought with him to college, and a little annoyed he hadn’t set up until then.

I watched as the world burned down, momentarily entertaining the idea of enlisting—not in a very serious way, but a more conscious way than ever I had before.

It was months later, just before Spring Break the next time the world ended. In a night I’d aspired to since before leaving home for college and by then given up on actualizing, I’d spent a night out at a bar listening to live music and wound up bringing a pretty woman back to my room. I thought this was it, for lack of experience to match it against, my first relationship. And yet, the night before I’d go home for the break, I got the email telling me that the woman who’d shared my bed the Saturday night before preferred that we go back to just being friends.

The timing was possibly a courtesy to give us a clean break before we’d have to see each other again, probably a calculated move to minimize awkward interactions, and definitely an extra hurt for not going home, as I’d anticipated, to tell my father and my friends that I had a girlfriend, but rather that I’d been dumped for the first time. And in this first heartbreak based on something real, based in touch, I felt the heat of apocalyptic flames closing in.

The world would end again in the years to follow. The invasion of Afghanistan. Failed relationships that were more true and fully realized. The invasion of Iraq. The first time I was threatened with a lawsuit over something I’d written in the college newspaper. When I got confused over a Daylight Savings Time shift and no-showed the first half of a group presentation. My first car accident. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final episode aired. When I graduated.

A lot can happen in a four-year period.

A lot can end.

I tend to look back at college as an idyllic time in mylife. Though I struggled to both make friends and make the kind of grades I wanted in my first semester, I’d stick it out to make dear friends, earn better grades, travel, head up the newspaper, write, learn, drink, dance, read, sing, and grow. I reflect on this time more often of late, settling into not only a job, but a career teaching at the college level with eighty or so students coming through my classrooms each semester, all of them facing transformations to their own worlds, fewer and fewer of them who were yet alive on September 11, 2001.

I want to tell them to appreciate this time, couched between reminding them of the value of topic sentences and expounding in lectures on short stories I love.

I like to think of myself as approachable, and some students do come talk to me about what’s going on in their personal lives.

I sympathize. Advise when I can.

Mostly I listen.

I never tell them it’s not the end of the world.