Semester above South U

We’re already moving full steam into the new semester, but I don’t think I’ve fully recovered from the previous one. Part of me wants to forge ahead and never look back at any part of 2020, but things don’t suddenly change when the clock strikes midnight, and the debris from the catastrophic year still lingers everywhere. It lingers in the unease and the discomfort of upending my first year of college. It lingers in my detached concept of home since we got sent back last March. And it lingers in my diminished sense of self caused by the agonizing purgatory that was quarantine. I know better than to think that the new year will change any of that, so here’s to looking back and finding comfort in the chaos of an otherwise cruel semester — to rediscovering what home feels like, above South University Avenue. 

As the last weeks of August approached, it was finally time to come back to Ann Arbor. It felt like coming back to life. After a six-month long haze, I was back to the most city-life experience my small suburban-upbringing self had known. And here I’d stay for the semester, in my room on the 16th floor of my apartment building. It was my cramped little space that allowed me to catch my breath for the first time in months. Things were different now. I was different. But the essence of my college coming-of-age was imminent. As the brilliant colors of the sunset faded into the first night of my post-quarantine freedom, I looked through my living room window to the street below. A line had begun to form outside of Brown Jug, and friends stumbled around, linked at the arms and masked up. That was the beginning of my infatuation with the eccentric character of South University Avenue. 

The semester would go on like this, and the weekend bustle would start as early as Wednesday, due to asynchronous schedules brought about by a new normal. 8 o’clock would bring the earliest sounds of soft laughter and music seeping through our windows, signifying the end of Zoom calls and the beginning of something more familiar. During a normal semester, I would be on my way to the UGLi for late hours of studying, but a long day of screens calls for more frequent breaks and new nightly routines. In time, my roommates and I took comfort in living vicariously through the people that walked down South U — it filled the void that came with missing out on what were supposed to be the best nights of our lives, in the name of public health safety. From above, we would drink along with the carousers, crafting the most ridiculous stories about those we saw and heard 16 floors down. Down there, that was Trish. With a skip in her step, she was on her way to meet up with the guy from class she kept pinned on her 11 a.m. Chemistry Zoom screen. She found home in romanticizing even the most reckless first dates.

On nights when Pizza House take-out was calling my name, I’d stay outside a bit longer, taking in the spirited characters of the street. From the rare political bar fights to the two people waiting outside of Champs Liquor Store standing too close to be just friends, I found home within the strangers that roamed South U. And slowly but surely, the deep disquiet of the past six months started to fade.

And when night turned to day, the sidewalks would populate with skateboard heads and students looking for a place to study. I’d peer down through my bedroom window, questioning the need for a sweatshirt in the early September morning. A woman running in shorts and a group of boys walking in t-shirts discouraged the extra layers as I got ready to make my own trek across campus. In those couple of seconds I spent gazing into the daily activities of people on that street, I felt comfort. I felt comfort in knowing that no matter how difficult the semester would get, we were in it together: me and my window view of this city and its people. And maybe that’s what coming home feels like. 

I remember the mess that was our first week of classes: from clashing Zoom calls in the living room to the dynamic sounds of the powerful Graduate Employees’ Organization strikes further down the street. It felt surreal and chaotic. That week stood as a painfully accurate precedent for the months to come, and as October turned into November, I promptly sensed the aftermath of an experimental semester gone wrong. But even in the chaos, I felt at peace in the home I had created. With the new lockdown order across campus, the street that once had so many stories to tell was empty, and my routine gaze down had lifted higher to the LED-lit living rooms and newly-decorated Christmas trees in the windows of the high-rises across from us. Every square was a different color; every square was a different story. Now, midterms and finals were upon us, and there was no time for idle people-watching. Nevertheless, as night time approached and lights flickered on, I was reminded of my pact with the view of South U. 

It’s hard to find what home is when you’re still caught in between who you are and who you’re becoming — when your concept of home continues to evolve as you do –– and it’s even harder with the added uncertainty of the inexhaustible pandemic. Home which was once tangible and easily observed by ties of family and community is now a distant abstraction of what it means to belong. For so long, I treated home as a destination –– from my parent’s suburban house to my 650 square-foot apartment. But that’s not home. Home is moments in time when you stop to look around. Home is seeing yourself in every stranger you watch pass by. Home is romanticizing the most mundane experiences and grounding yourself within them. Last semester, I found home within South University Avenue.