Bosto Continued...

By the time we arrived in Cambridge the sun was out, and as I watched the Victorians and esteemed brick schoolhouses planted behind plot after generous sidewalk plot of every leaf bearing neighbor extending their pink blossoms over our view of kempt students passing through their days with lugs of volumes stacked into brown leather shoulder bags, I was overcome by the feeling one has in a new place she wishes to know as her own.  My heart rushed to imagine myself as one of those students, or another bus passenger, and perhaps someone standing at a fourth story window worrying about a paper while watching a girl cross the lawn.  I put my face behind the bus driver and imagined how I would smile at an emerging passenger.  The bizarre flavor of this whole trick seems to be the element of my trip that resounds in me; that this happening was casual, natural even.  I didn’t say oh boy, this’ll be fun, getting a sense of life at Harvard by pretending I’m each person I see on my path.  However, this imagining did help me to form an impression of the place so that I could understand how to mesh in, and of course how one might not.  Similar to what we so freely do while watching a movie that promises to take us places otherwise we perhaps would or could not go; we watch the actors on the screen and embody a gangster, a princess, or a child again so as to get a sense of the story and what it wants us to understand as a whole.  Of course, the difference with life being that we’ve got to sew our own meanings together, and the meaning we derive once we’ve stepped off the bus and into the free foot world how we come to be in this world has something to do with how we see and something to do with how others see, all of us ourselves and others.

 

We carried my things to the second floor and placed them in the corner beside the modern black leather sofa set on silver stilts.  I felt like I was back in England or shopping in the section of IKEA that I can’t afford.  The sparse, muted décor was offset by a lone gathering of tulips atop the table in the adjoined kitchen living room expanse.  It wasn’t spotless, but neatly kept, and in the ensuing three days we would trash it with take out, bottles with varying alcoholic contents, high publications, an iron and its board, cheese bits, cigarette butts, and a spattering of a continually disjointed blanket set escaping from a dim-witted, self-impressed, and charmingly deflating air mattress known as my bed. 

After a quick change out of the star printed ill-fitting beater I’d taken on loan from a little sister Stef and I bumbled past the wooden sided homes into Cambridge town center to meet with her boyfriend; the apartment’s permanent resident.