Today was my first day of university! It’s 11 am as I write this (but you’ll probably read it a lot later), and so far I’ve fulfilled the mandatory quota of running around campus familiarizing myself with it, and attended no lectures because my course schedule hasn’t been finalized. I woke up at 5 am, partly, I think, because I was naturally excited for the day ahead, but mostly, I’m reasonably sure, because sleeping in an empty hostel room is a lonesome, austere, terrible experience. After showering and getting dressed, I walked into a beautiful morning, with a red dawn sky and the cool, insouciant morning air that makes mornings the best time of day (if not the best, certainly the most romantically quiet and peaceful). As far as I could see, there was no one around other than the cleaning staff and a guy sleeping on a sofa, books left open by his side and a litany of notes scrawled on paper. He was the first student I met, and in a way it was perfectly indicative of the time to come. The halls were otherwise ominously empty and silent but for the sounds of vacuum cleaners operating too far away to be seen or located by hearing. I sat on the sofa across the room and waited.
People are strangely excited to be spoken to here, and always follow introductions with a “Pleased to meet you” or a “Tasharrafna” or some other equally thankful and incredulously spoken pleasantry—they’re happy to simply be acknowledged. It reminded me of something a dear friend of mine once noted on her first day of university, something my more solipsist persuasions made me forget and overlook on my first day: everyone else is just as nervous as you. You’re not the only one whose stomach is turning on itself and you’re not the only one too apprehensive to tread over your fear and attempt making friends; in fact, everyone else is, too. It’s kindergarten again, and you’re just as afraid as that snot-nosed kid you were, and the others are just as inscrutably threatening monsters, you’re just as masochistically drawn to them, drunk with hope and the promise of taming the odds enough to forge a friendship, you’re just as ostensibly alone, and it’s just as much of a breathtakingly life-changing event.
I’m nostalgic, too. I was listening to music earlier (Speed of Sound by Coldplay) when I realized how much I’m barraged with archaic emotion. I feel like I did when I was a ten, when in the fifth grade I had to change schools when my dad’s job had us move from city to city. I feel that uncertainty again; it’s the very same feeling, the hesitance, the clenching in my stomach and—at the risk of purulent cliché—the gloomy darkening in my mind. I feel like a worried child again, but not in a bad way. I’ve grown up, and perhaps because of that, the worry that once translated to simple fear now translates to optimism, something I might consider a more complex response. The ten-year-old has acquired some new sensibilities, and they’re helping him in two-months-from-being-eighteen form. I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic.
By Ahmed Samir
