IN TRANSITION #5
Editor's note: This is one in a series of occasional reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering real life.
I used to joke about this day -- the day that Harvard kicked me out of the dorms for good -- and how I'd be forced to surf from couch to couch.
I'm not laughing now.
By today, I had expected I would be all moved into my clean, hip East Boston apartment I had arranged to sublet weeks ago. Failing at that, I have suddenly been reduced to houseguest status at my former college roommates' apartment (yeah, I know, they were successful at getting a place). But I'm not so bad off, really.
My failure to secure housing upon eviction from college was not my fault. Miscommunication with my would-be roommates led to a ''T"-minus-36-hours discovery that my housing had fallen through. Hours of confusion and the frantic search for an apartment eventually paid off -- despite intense introspection and frequent bouts of panic (''Is this instability really worth it?"). Now I am all set to move to Somerville in September. All set -- except I'm still wondering if I'm ready to take the leap.
The place is nice, without a doubt. New appliances. Two porches. Beats dorm life any day. But my roommates, who (don't get me wrong) seem perfectly nice, are all strangers. I've lived the last four years with the same two friends.
Though I guess we were once strangers, too. Freshman year, after eating dining hall meals in quiet awkwardness, my roommates and I would return to our suite, sit down at our solitary desks, and distract ourselves on the Internet, e-mailing friends from home, reading, anything to take our minds off the college's failed efforts at forced socialization. We shared a living space, but we could hardly hold a conversation.
A futon changed everything. We went on an adventure together four years ago to Central Square, trying to scheme up a way to transport one of those ubiquitous $200 metal futons up Mass. Ave. without a car (we eventually caved and waved down a station wagon cab). How did we bond? Decoding poorly translated assembly directions. To this day, I'm still not sure what to do with so many kinds of washers. Once it was assembled, I must admit it really tied the common room together -- not to mention us.
Sure, we've grown in different directions over the years, and we always spent summers apart, but this is the first fall in four years we won't be reconvening to swap stories and unpack together -- where the seasonal ritual of futon re-assembly will happen alone. In fact, that futon will be my new bed when (or, gasp, if) I get to Somerville.
The other night, we had gathered together for a farewell dinner (one friend is moving to Michigan). We had dinner, drank wine, played Trivial Pursuit. Afterward, doing dishes, my friend muttered about the strangeness of people wandering in and out of one's life. My thought: Would I ever again have so many wonderful people so close by?
We'll keep in touch, and we mean it when we say it. But there's so much that's unsettled. After all, I'm living on a couch. With the fragility of my housing situation, I've been telling myself to anticipate the unpredictable, but you can only prepare for so much. Life after graduation -- or at least the Intro course -- has been much more difficult than any class at Harvard.
As my soon-to-be landlord said, ''You sometimes feel like life just keeps happening to you."
At least with new roommates, whatever happens next won't happen to me alone.
Benjamin Toff lives on a futon at his friend's place in Cambridge, but he plans to move to Somerville very soon. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.
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