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Two weeks before the end of August, I was on the bus back to New Jersey, stoic as hell. Summer felt like a body, tight. Air was wet, made the trees black. Didn’t know it before, but life has a pace to it. I’d planned on moving through it all like life, people and classes and feelings and music and winter. I kept thinking about freshman fall. Last September, I thought, you keep looking backwards, you won’t move forwards. I took transition hard, the way most people do. I was post-existential, sharp. I was going to take my life like a bad boy and make it work for me because I could. I thought I succeeded until I didn’t because being alone, this place, made me soft in ways I didn’t know I could be. I spent so much of freshman year thinking of home I doubted I could recognize it when I came back. I dreamt so much that year I felt it in my chest.

This summer I kept thinking about growing up. I went to the MoMA and watched Maggie Lee’s "Mommy," her autobiographical video in multiple parts. Lee also grew up in suburban New Jersey, yellow. I kept remembering her story’s colors, the neons, her long thick hair, the words she chose like “think” and “circus” and “daddy’s little girl.” I kept wondering which colors I’d pick, which moments. In what ways could I, like Lee, convey a life, show I was done but not over it, make each aspect as obviously falsifiable as I knew it to be, but breathless, intoxicating, cool.

I think all girls know what girlhood’s supposed to look like, regardless of how far from it they are. My version was tween-skinny, virginal. First cigs on your eighteenth birthday; flings, far and faded like a drug. I was supposed to Abramovic my life, because even then, I knew life was all about how you imagined it. Once a girl a year above me showed me a poem she wrote. She wanted to know how drunk felt like so she locked herself in her room with her parents’ beer in hand. Sipped but wasn’t too dizzy, wasn’t even buzzed. Ended up storing the can under her bed. I kept wondering if it was all true, because I felt the seduction, the click of the lock. We wanted cities bad. We were suburban and bored and we wanted Manhattan lights and thigh-highs and walks at three and noise, jazz, glitz. We were all getting the hell out because we were too dramatic or too smart or too soulful or too alternative for our little New Jersey town with nothing to do but that Starbucks on the corner or boys we’d been bored of for three years already.

Looking back, we were good at it, the language of girling, because we were dreaming it, not living it. A friend of mine loved writing about straddling fences, football fields at midnight, and I bought it, even if I knew she spent most nights doing homework til two in the morning. The girls in her stories wore floral dresses. The wires dug into their panties.

I remember home like girlhood, because maybe it was. What if home was nothing but longing? To me, New Jersey was the most beautiful place in the world, and I had proof, because the bounciest song on "Miseducation" was “Every Ghetto, Every City,” an ode to what Lauryn Hill called New Jerusalem. Junot Diaz wouldn’t ever stop loving this place and naming his stories “Edison, New Jersey” and keeping his characters in Paterson. In Boston, I missed being acknowledged, and in New Jersey, the people looked you in the eye.

But maybe it was all in my head. I came back and it rained, colored things. Maybe this is New Jersey, and maybe this is life. Things are gorgeous if they’re yours, dull if they aren’t. Home isn’t the boxes in it, nor even the people. It’s the place that grew with you, that formed you before you formed it. My home was suburban, quiet, and green. I thought I could invent and reinvent myself like a phoenix, because I was from a nowhere, where everything that was valuable was implicit, soft-spoken, something you knew only if you lived it.

I read an article about white girlhood, this carefreeness, sunset-through-a-filter-ness, this sad-but-not-too-sad flimsiness. The article said that not everyone could aspire to white girlhood. Not everyone had the privilege to be flimsy and carefree and pretty and angsty, so we had to stop discussing femininity as if it was the same for everyone. The article was right, and I’d never imagined myself as white, but I hadn’t realized my girlhood fit perfectly into that trope. Looking back, it didn’t. I was a homework bitch. I played the piano. I went to Science Olympiad. I never left my house much. But I was imagining a world in which I was white inside.

A friend from home visited Cambridge last October. When the kid left, I couldn’t stop writing. I kept thinking about places, what the little parts of them meant. In New York, the roads are grids, and intersections are expected, common, and if you don’t like one direction, you can flip and turn; the opposite is right. You can have a system. You can make it to the cross of 34th and Avenue of the Americas only passing through 31st once. But here, in Cambridge, you walk and the road turns. You stop by Eliot Street and wonder if it’s the same one you’d passed twenty minutes ago. There are five ways to make it somewhere, more ways to get lost, and one decision to make: If you’ll keep your feet stepping one in front of another, or if you’ll turn back. Chances are, you’ll still end in the same place.

Christina M. Qiu, ‘19 lives in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.