Neekta Baghoolizadeh

I sit in my dorm room, sunlight shyly peeking through the windows. Around me, everything is glisteningly new. Maybe not the objects themselves—my desk, my chair, my mattress, each material undoubtedly worn down by the memories of students before—but the idea of them is new, or at least, new to me. My first week of college has gone by in a blur of senseless sounds and colors. I have different versions of the same conversations with different people, in different places, all the while I am told I am becoming a different version of myself. I am on the precipice of the next chapter of my life.

Earlier, my older sister called me with a statistic masquerading as a piece of advice: on average, it takes someone about three months to settle into a new place. So I set about the process of settling in. I wander around campus enough that, eventually, Apple Maps falls from its rank as my second most-used app. The abundance of green stops shocking me (but never becomes less enamoring). My classes anchor themselves as the constant timepiece of my life. Settling in, I think, is just a softer way of expressing the same sentiment: you will be changed. The paths on campus do not change. The Campanile, standing tall at her watchful post over the campus, does not change. The slightly cramped dimensions of my twin XL mattress does not change. I am the only one being reshaped, molded to fit the contours of my new life. 

Of course, I knew this change was coming, and I wanted it to be on my own terms. Berkeley was undeniably a fresh start, a chance to deliberately become, as the cliché went, whoever I wanted to be. I itemized myself, cataloguing my habits: I wanted to procrastinate less, I wanted to be less scared of moving through the world, and I wanted to stay in love with reading.

My whole life, as far back as I can remember, has been a love affair with books. A second home I could hold in my hands. I read in the bathroom (to my mom’s dismay), in the car (to my own dismay, once the inevitable headache set in), and even at my sister’s wedding (to nearly everyone’s dismay, except for my seven-year-old self, who was very invested in Little House on the Prairie and significantly less so in long speeches about love and partnership). I was coming to Berkeley as a hopeful English major. 

But as the first week passed in a haze, and then the second, and the third, I had yet to finish reading anything, other than what my classes imposed on me. I picked up books and poetry collections, only to leave them waylaid halfway through, distracted by an assignment that had come up, by the ever-changing new world, both inside and outside of me. Everything around me was so foreign, demanding of my attention and energy, that travelling once more to yet another world felt unthinkable.

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Still, I was walking away from something just as she was, and I followed her epic as I cut my own path. 

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Hidden in that struggle, though, was the solution. I didn’t want to travel to a new world, but rather to retreat to an old one. I was homesick, oddly enough, not just for my own home, but for the residences of my favorite stories too. I spent a week listening to the audiobooks of the Poppy War trilogy on 2.5x speed as I cut through campus, letting my feet lead me where I needed to go as I lost myself again in R.F. Kuang’s rich imagination. I was still the same person I had been two years ago when I first stumbled upon this same trilogy; for all its brutal descriptions of war, here, I was safe. I retraced the steps of the protagonist, Rin, as she escapes an abusive household for a military academy, where she quickly gets embroiled in the lore of shamanism and the encroaching war. In a lot of ways, I couldn’t be farther from Rin—I thankfully came from a loving family, and am building a stable life at Berkeley. Still, I was walking away from something just as she was, and I followed her epic as I cut my own path. 

After finishing The Poppy War, I set my sights on another of my favorite series: The Raven Cycle. It had all the same comfort The Poppy War carried, and yet after the second book, I wasn’t lost in it the same way I had been. I had loyally followed Blue and Gansey and their friends in the search for the Welsh king Glendower for a full book, but somewhere in the second installment, I wandered off. Something within me itched and churned, where The Raven Boys couldn’t reach. 

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Eventually, I stand up, for the thousandth time. There is a whole world out there, one which is changing me every day, one which I am determined to change in return.

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Nearly two months of college had passed now. I couldn’t keep clinging to the past with the same excuse of needing something of my old routine to hold onto—college quickly was becoming the routine. And if I wasn’t careful, I knew I would keep walking in circles, never stepping onto a new path. 

Now, I sit again in my dorm room, as I have done every day for the past three months. The midday sunlight streams through the window in big gulps. I am reading Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, for the first time. Eventually, I stand up, for the thousandth time. There is a whole world out there, one which is changing me every day, one which I am determined to change in return. I stand in the doorway, and I move through it.

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