ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Classes at the local state university, the one I attended for nearly three years, started last Thursday. The past tense is intentional. I’ve known for a few weeks now that I wasn’t going back there, and when I made this decision and the plans that went along with it I was entirely fine with the arrangement. Now I think I am mostly fine with it. The university has a large steam whistle that it blows every morning periodically to signal class periods, and on many days it is clearly audible even across town. Friday morning I woke up to attend my financial aid meeting with DeVry and when I got out of the shower and turned off the fan in the bathroom the whistle was the first thing I heard. It reminded me of a spring morning my sophomore year, when I woke up in my lower bunk at about seven in the morning and was lying there quietly just enjoying the bird sound outside, and the steam whistle went off. Nothing remarkable happened to cement the moment in my head forever, but this was what I thought of when I stepped out of the steamy bathroom and heard the whistle.

Memories tend to follow each other like cars in a fast-moving train, though, and all of a sudden it wasn’t just the university I was giving up anymore, it was a place where I’d made friends with my roommate, and where I had a number of now bittersweet things to recall about my now former roommate and best friend, and where I’d been happy and angry and sad and contemptuous and cheerful. Goodbye, student body of twenty thousand. Goodbye, walking across a huge campus trying to avoid Mormons, Hare Krishna, and student senate supporters. Goodbye, plans to invent the most obnoxious student organizations possible simply to provide a means by which to confuse the student population. There won’t be a Campus Crusade For Cthulhu religious group for me to found, or a Human-Dolphin Alliance student senate campaign for me to pilot at DeVry. Will I miss those things about my university? Yes. Was I wrong to leave? I don’t know.

The state university wasn’t really taking me much of anywhere at this point, although much of this was my fault. When our ex-roommate left so abruptly and stormily back at the end of May, again something to which I had contributed, the rest of my life seemed to demand reexamination as well. After all, this person I’d considered my best friend for two years was out of my life without a trace, and things toward the end had been so miserable that all I could feel was relief. I had a one remaining friend, no real job, and two years worth of foreign language study. Where was I going? I didn’t know then, and if you asked me the question in present tense I’d probably have only a marginally better answer.

The whole year for me has been a time of ebbing and flowing relationships. The ex-roommate and I ended our friendship with the more or less mutual opinion that the other was a terrible human being in just about every way. The remaining roommate, with whom I’d been identifying more and more closely as my friendship with the ex-roommate dwindled, stepped in to fill her shoes. My army ranger friend came to see me on leave right after the ex-roommate left, and I spent three days with him just basking in the warmth of unconditional friendship. My boyfriend and I also became closer this year.

Since the ex-roommate’s departure I’m not really a part of any group of friends in this town, but I don’t mind right now. In a way I miss the company, but it’s also a relief to have cut loose from people who didn’t really add much to my life in any way either.

Sometimes now I think of everything that has happened in the past few years since I started turning into a real life person whose decisions and life aren’t completely made and run by her parents anymore, and I think to myself that for me, the people in my life are what make it matter more than anything. When I’m old, maybe I won’t look back on my life and think, I was a translator, or I was a CPA. I’ll look back and think about the people who made me happy.