What We Sow and What We Reap: Fall Memories Over the Years
The beauty of the ever-changing landscape of the heart
When Harry Met Sally; on the campus of UChicago
The Lofty Ideal of American University
There’s something about universities in the fall1 that begs to be written into memory. My theory? It’s the way we romanticize the American college experience.
The idea of fresh-faced, eager-to-learn students walking on cobblestone paths with books they didn’t overpay for as the leaves turn various shades of red, brown, yellow, and orange, and discourses take place in intimate classrooms around what Shakespeare was really trying to say in Macbeth is so quintessentially American.
Innocence on the cusp of adulthood. The ideal of academia without the reality of the world crashing in. Everyone gets a happy ending, wears oversized sweaters, and studies in Hogwarts-esque libraries.
We’ll party all night while banging out As in the classroom or redeeming ourselves if we get a B, the horror, and find our perfect mates just in time for winter.
We’ll make hot chocolate with our still-pubescent boyfriends as the leaves fall aesthetically outside of our dorm windows. That will transition into making pancakes while watching the snow fall into marriage into babies who grow up and relive it all over again.
Something about universities in the fall begs to be written, and I can only tell you what I know.
Colleges in the fall are cesspools for two things: hooking up and getting assaulted. Everyone’s horny, and the pumpkin spice lattes, apples, and the crisp scent in the air that tells you winter is surely on its way suddenly make every college in America a breeding ground for STDs.
Women between the ages of 18-24 on college campuses are at 3 times higher risk of sexual assault, and 50 percent of the assaults that will happen occur between the start of fall semester and Thanksgiving break.
My theory? Fraternities and sororities are rushing. Older boys know that freshman and sophomore girls are new at spotting danger and are excited to be at college. Newer girls are likely looking for someone to trust in a new environment. (Notably, it’s not just younger students this happens to, and not just women). It’s easy to take advantage of that innocent glow that stems from the ideal of the American university experience.
Drexel in December of 2017. Look at those leaves hanging on!
An Angelic End to Fall 2017
It’s Fall 2017. It’s a freezing cold night in December, the kind of chill that pierces into your bones and makes your teeth chatter - and yes, it’s absolutely still fall because even though everything is dead, we haven’t gone home for final exams yet, and only once the frost of those final grade entries sets in can it truly be winter.
Having dumped my ex-boyfriend on the sidewalk on the quad a little over one month earlier, I am sitting in Bubblefish. God, I love Bubblefish. Last fall, fall of 2016, I was completely fresh at Drexel University. Terrified, shell-shocked, and stressed out of my mind, this is where my roommate brought me. First sushi. First outing just for fun. First and everlasting restaurant love in Philly. If the Sixers build a stadium on top of it, I’ll never get over it.
Bubblefish is romantic at night, with little tealights on the table. It’s where I bring all of my first dates, but they don’t need to know that. I simply love an excuse to go to my favorite restaurant and order my favorite - crab rolls and takoyaki, and maybe a smoothie, although not this December night.
Not just any crab rolls! These are from Bubblefish.
The fish tank is bubbling peacefully next to me when I notice a guy who looks like a cherub walk in with a confused look on his face, complete with golden curls and a white cowl neck sweater like God dropped him straight from heaven. Is this him? It must be. He’s a little more baby-ish in the face than his Tinder?Hinge?Bumble?Match.com? hinted at.
Three witty quips into our conversation, I don’t care. It’s happening again! I’m falling in love with the idea of falling in love.
By the time we’re sharing a six-pack of decent beer on his couch, I imagine telling the story of how we met in 5 years. Same college! Middle of the winter date! We spent the first blissful few months in his historic West Powelton apartment! What a story.
The morning after our date - literally- I trudge home. I did not come prepared to stay at this boy-man’s home, so I’d like to go to mine. It’s 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., and I’ve decided it’s best to go home to my dorm in 20-degree weather than use someone else’s toothbrush.
The streets are oddly peaceful, covered, I think, in snow or ice or a mixture of the two. I encounter no one, and on that 10-minute walk home, I experience the most peace with myself I probably have in a while.
We text, and text, and I think meet up some more… it’s all blurry, and it’s blurring into finals week, the last week before I get to go home for 2 hallowed weeks of free time.
A semester of drinking a little too early in the day and a little too heavily at parties is almost behind me. My first semester running with my campus EMS squad and getting blown down the street by a Nor’easter. My first semester attending 2(!) Friendsgivings.
I feel like I belong in this place where the trees synchronize their turning yellow for two weeks in October and then drop all of their leaves in a flurry of wind whipping through the streets of our pocket of the world.
The Centripetal Acceleration of Dating Two Guys at Once
A semester of physics is almost behind me, with God help us all, [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] is the worst professor I’ve ever had. I don’t know why he went into teaching, and we’re all struggling to figure out how on Earth to manage to swing a C on Professor [REDACTED]’s exams.
As the Earth is preparing to hibernate, so are our hopes about what we might be able to pull off on this exam.
By we, I mean me and - let’s call him Oliver. He’d laugh at that. Oliver wears the same black peacoat every day with the same plaid scarf, and we’ve been comparing notes and eye rolls all semester because we’re in the same recitation with the same TA who cannot explain physics to us worth a damn.
It’s only at the end of the Week 9 recitation2(the Week before finals) that Oliver asks me if I’d like to study together. I say yes. Maybe I ask him because I think he’s cute. I do think that. Does it matter now who asked who?
So, as the guy from the date - Jim - and I are beginning to hit it off, Oliver and I are desperately trying to understand what the centripetal acceleration of an airplane is. I’m figuring out that if you like two guys at the same time, maybe neither will know about the other.
So as fall drew to a close, seasonal drinks were taken off of menus, and trees were as bare as bare could be, I flew home with the delusion that I had two guys wrapped around my finger. I didn’t want to live with that, so I told Jim that “dating wasn’t a priority for me right now” the same way you might tell your child that carving a pumpkin is just not going to happen this year.
What Goes Around, Comes Back Around
Oliver told me he wanted something casual, no strings attached.
I buried everything I had harvested from Fall of 2017 in Winter and Spring of 2018, particularly in this romantic relationship-thing I had started with Oliver.
The bitterness of winter took over as he treated me like the girlfriend I wanted so badly to be. The first buds of spring started to show as I was denied the emotional benefits of the girlfriend I was not.
A late frost iced the world over as I cried in his apartment, not for the wreck I had made of our non-relationship, but over all of it. Over my shattered soul and complete inability to comprehend how someone had tried to take my bodily autonomy and everyone else’s world seemed to keep spinning while mine had come to a halt. Over the fact that no one could make this completely better for me but me, and time.
Flowers bloomed as my 20th birthday came around and I tried to feel something again by sleeping with that boy I had dumped on the sidewalk when the air of 2017 had still been crisp and assault-free.
Remember him?
Warmth came back into my body as I traveled to Texas on alternative spring break for a service trip, literally far away from the winter of my own soul, and began to warm up to the idea of life again.
Oliver and I no longer spoke, although we would speak again one day, as friends. Some hurt runs so deeply that we end up hurting others with it, especially if they were never prepared to hold space for that hurt.
Me, in Philly, in Spring. It wasn’t the easiest Spring, but I didn’t document those parts.
I reached out to Jim. Why, this boy who had been so cleanly turned away wondered, why now?
It was a good question.
I told him my priorities had changed and that I was interested in seeing if there was still a spark. It was almost too easy of a sell. Perhaps the ease with which we slipped back into that first date magic - making pancakes in the kitchen while the snow fell over Powleton Village- should have been a red flag from the start.
Our relationship was fun. He was living away from Philadelphia, doing an internship, so I saw him on the weekends. We played our parts well, boyfriend and girlfriend. It was believable. Yet, neither of us was the answer to the hurt we each harbored.
We broke up in June, right before I got my first tattoo when it was so hot out you had to slow down to get a proper breath in and bring a change of clothes everywhere. Fall was about to come back around, in the form of, unsurprisingly, another boy who said things he didn’t mean for his own personal gain.
The leaves beginning to change and fall on Lancaster Avenue
Reaping What We Sow, In Time
I’ve learned over the years that what we harvest in the fall can take time to appear. Did you know asparagus plants can take 6 years to produce any fruit? In fall of 2019, I would live through my first boyfriendless fall in 5 years. I savored those morning walks down Lancaster Avenue, watching the yellow leaves fall off of the trees.
I loved stopping in a coffee shop for a latte, or my personal favorite 2 years after starting EMS, a hazelnut coffee from Wawa. I loved TA’ing Biology classes and pretending to know what on Earth I was talking about, remembering when I had been in those spinning chairs worrying about my grade, or this boy, that boy, or the other boy.
It was lovely to just be me.
Fall happens every year, but it also happens over our lifetimes. Again and again, we let go of old patterns. Again and again, we reap the fruits of new behaviors we’re trying to teach ourselves, sometimes without realizing it.
One day, we may find ourselves engaged to a wonderful man who goes camping with us in the fall, carves pumpkins(always better than our own, lest we forget because it is a pumpkin carving competition), and makes us special hot chocolate. He even buys a dog with us so that she can play in the leaves.
Campsite at Crabtree Falls State Park; my first time camping with my now-fiance
Someone sowed a horrible seed in my life in late fall of 2017, sometime before or after that first date with Jim the cherub. I don’t have a great sense of linear time that December. He was a boy, too. I took my bare hands and I dug every last root of his I could out of my soil, and then I grew around the ones I could not pull up because they had shaped my landscape.
Unbeknownst to him, long before he ever sowed his late-season crop, so many people sowed seeds of love and continue to, every day. I grow them, slowly, in this ever-changing landscape of my heart, and when it’s harvest time, I reap their fruits, again, and again, and again.
Fall = Autumn
We were actually on a quarter system at Drexel = 10 weeks to do 15 works worth of work. I say semester throughout this piece because most American colleges use semesters, like they want to treat their students like human beings :)