How I Met My Roommate

I met my roommate because a short-haired girl in a tank-top, standing behind a veil of cotton candy, kept me from leaving the SOCH early on a Thursday night. When I recognized her face, I hello-interrupted her teasing of the candy spinner. Because of the conversation, I stayed and ate two cones.

It was the first week of freshman year, and the darkness didn’t scare me yet. I was a puppy with newly-opened eyes: Everyone was a potential friend, every activity exciting, every building full of secrets to uncover.

I ran into a boy while walking out, and we talked about Seamus Heaney in the warm air. Some joined as they floated by the SOCH: a boy who’d grown up in Kenya, but whose father had gone to the same New York high school as another boy; two girls who had never met, both from LA. We all were mixed—if not in race, then in culture. We were all fish out of water in a concrete building in old New England, belonging but slant, puzzle pieces misfit to form a collage. And to me, who’d never felt at home anywhere, this was more beautiful than the puzzle might have been.

A girl I’d just met asked: “Why don’t you walk back with us?” So I did.

After dark, the city was alive as it was in day; the lights and the number of voices and people blurred and when I talked, my accent was unfamiliar in my ears. We walked back a different way than we came; we walked into and with two of her FOP-mates who joked like they’d known each other for ages and laughed as if the world were their audience.

We walked to meet a boy who feared learning Spanish, but spoke eight languages. We discussed and dithered in four of them. I called a friend from downstairs and we followed the two FOP-friends to the fifth floor of Thayer, where we found fifteen people we didn’t know and a tree of scarves and jewelry, blended in my memory so that all is twinkling silver.

The girl who welcomed us in became my roommate.

This wasn’t my favorite night from freshman fall—that might have been the night where eight of my entryway-mates took the midnight train to Revere Beach to swim; or the night I learned to play pool in Adams basement; or many of the other nights from the first week, saturated with magic and good weather. But this was the night that I, who’d never felt much at home anywhere, felt that the world had opened up to me, that there was finally a place where I belonged. During freshman fall, ordinary occurrences like the one above transcended the sum of their parts; ordinary interactions with people became glimpses of the divine.

Since then, much has changed. The lives of this snowball sample of people have intricately connected and unconnected and reconnected. I’ve more regrets than I can count at Harvard: I wish I could stretch time to know people more deeply and learn more broadly, but I condense time for interviews and office hours. Classes are exciting every first week, but the magic of learning wears down by the semester’s end, when even speaking a new language or finding a significant p-value or watching a film seems a chore. Through the prism in which I see things today, perhaps this would have been just another night, caught between another night of uninspired essay-ing and another night of lamenting my GPA.

Like all post-freshman, I’ve lost most of the sense of magic.

Moreover, I was wrong that night—I haven’t always belonged at Harvard, because no one does. I am aware that the personal here indeed is the political, and that there is importance in politically-focused articles on life at Harvard—and more so, about life around the world.

But the political is not the extent of the personal, something we too often forget. Like a good social studies concentrator, I’m writing to begin thinking about something that’s missing from the discourse: wonder and the transcendent, that which makes life worth living.

We live in a world where you can find soulmates swing-dancing, if you so wish, where you can discuss Irish poets or laugh as if the world’s your audience—and where there are friends and star-like scarves and warmth. Wonder is a beautiful thing—a deeply human thing. And if you look, you can find it anywhere—even in ordinary situations, and even at Harvard.

So come walk with me.

Siobhan McDonough ’17, a social studies concentrator, lives in Kirkland House. Her Summer column will normally appear on alternate Mondays.