Prologue

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Thank you for sharing your freshman experience with me. I know that our perspectives are different but I am dismayed to find that I have great trouble empathizing with some of the happenings you described. You dealt mostly with your solutions to the problems of leaving that I am facing now. I need to hear more about the problems.

I was startled by your recollections. I'm just at the beginning of the separation-from-home process. i have not yet experienced the feelings of abandonment and loneliness which accompany any leave-taking and which are sometimes resolved in those sudden attachments to other freshmen. I am preoccupied with questions. Will my family forget about me? Will my sisters get all of my parents' love and attention? Is there anybody out there like me?

You seemed to be interested in the ways that you as freshmen dealt with your arrival. What happened before you departed? Instead of trying to envisage a Matthews' quad with seven people, I am imagining my room stripped of familiar belongings. I'm not ready to worry about extricating myself from an intense relationship with the guy down the hall. I want to know if my boyfriend will write to me. You remember the way in which you established the relationship to combat loneliness. I am just realizing that I might be lonely.

I know that the experiences you wrote about are linked to the worries that I have now. I think, though, that you discussed your resolutions of my universal feelings. You wrote Chapter One. Perhaps some year incoming freshmen will be invited to write a Prologue.

Harvard doesn't begin in September, it began in April. Laura Prarer '80