Sebastian White :: Can you ever really come home?

ESSAYS

Can You Ever Really Come Home?

The Alfred Sun | June 10, 2004
By Sebastian White

On the first anniversary of our departure from the Kanakadea Valley, we reunite on our home turf. We are three idealistic young people, once deeply intertwined, now with three distinct lives being played out in a Los Angeles youth center, a New York City public school, and a Boston corporate office.

We come for senior shows, an excuse to return to the place we love, the place that became our home over four glorious, if occasionally tumultuous, years at Alfred University. It’s the place where we matured, where we danced under brilliantly clear skies, survived endless lake-effect winters, and where we laughed and cried our way to become the “educated” man and women we are today.

In many ways, this is a most peculiar homecoming.

We come together on the village green, each having endured long journeys, geographically and psychologically, to get to this place. We embrace tightly and narrow the glaring gap between us, between our disparate lives that are slowly drifting apart.

We don’t have words for this moment, but our faces articulate a story of their own. Our awkward smiles and distant looks speak of a year of challenge and change, a year outside this comfort zone of self-exploration and self-expression.

We’ve reunited before, on a sun-kissed southern California beach, in a cramped Manhattan apartment, but this time, in the endless expanse of hill and dale that we know so well, it’s different.

Here, where our pasts intersect clumsily with the present, our conversations are more fractured, our words more measured. Emotionally, we are wiser and more depressed, let down by the real world as it unfolds in all its supposed glory.

Underneath our strained smiles, there is a lurking discomfiture. Beneath the surface, the burden of a year outside of Alfred, we are changed. We choose not to acknowledge the reality of this rendezvous. Instead, we dance around it.

The truth is, we don’t know how to be in Alfred this way. We can’t be the people we are now. We strain to emulate the personas we created during our formative years spent strutting down Academic Alley, posturing in the gym, and kvetching over drinks at Manhattan West on Saturday nights. But we can’t navigate this new terrain. We simply come up short. We are different people today.

Eventually, it comes time to leave again. We walk down a darkening Main Street and say our goodbyes one more time.

“They say, ‘you can’t come home again,’” one of us muses. “Maybe it’s true.” We linger on the thought, just a space too long. We think about the difference between can’t and shouldn’t.

The three of us huddle in the cold as a torrential downpour begins to bucket the village. We don’t notice. Instead, we just smile uncomfortably, knowing that this reunion could—or should?—be our last in this storied place.

We head off bedraggled looking, each thinking about that line. Indeed, as we make our ways back to our separate lives, away from the comfort of Alfred, we wonder, can you ever really come home again?