WHITING: WoTo 12B: A love story

Summer beckons, but almost too soon. I never thought I’d say that.

I guess Asher Roth got it right &- I, too, want to go to college for the rest of my life. Thus, I’m trying to squeeze every bit that I can out of my first year at Boston University before I have to head home to Nowhereville. Never mind my un-Asher Roth-like lifestyle &- college, it seems, doesn’t allow for dull evenings no matter what the circumstances.

Luckily my circumstance has been a good ones, and &- never thought I’d say this, either &- I’m not entirely sure that I’m ready to bid communal bathrooms and tiny closets farewell. I don’t know what I’ll do for four months without fake money for Papa John’s pizza or WTBU folk music at one in the morning. I’m only a freshman, but I’m already freaking out about the speed of time.

It’s been quite the year. I learned how to row on the Charles River, how to waltz and tango, how to locate books in Mugar Library and how to depend on Starbucks to keep my over-stimulated brain alive. I nearly failed a science midterm, I expanded my vernacular and I realized that while the grass looks greener on Harvard Yard, perceptions of the ideal change pretty quickly when a person falls in love, and I’ve fallen in love with BU, specifically with floor 12B of Warren Towers.

Friday night &- the last with my beloved floormates before we began to consider studying for finals &- was spent in my dorm room playing IQ-enhancing games like Scattergories and Bananagrams. While blocking together letters to jointly spell un-Dictionary.com-worthy words like “sex,” “squid” and “sin,” we reminisced about the beginning of the year and our first encounters with each other; about the times before it was acceptable to walk around in our pajamas and leave our doors unlocked at all times.

Our introductions occurred as most in college do, with the awkward first floor gathering during which residents perused the room for potential laptop thieves before exchanging names, hometowns and supposed majors. But those then-budding friendships have since blossomed into a bond unbreakable, even by summer’s promised severance. Still, I’m getting anxious more about that separation than I am my upcoming exams.

But the end of the year entails dispersal, and thus begins the collegiate cycle of blending new friends with old that I’ve got to familiarize myself with. Coming back next September, we’ll all be spread out, some of us in South Campus and others in their own apartments. When I introduce my Bluto Blutarsky poster to his new home in Myles Standish Hall, I’m going to miss Kabir entering my room without knocking to show off his new jeans. I’ll miss Belva running around on holidays hanging Christmas ornaments and Hershey’s Kisses on everyone’s doors, and Nancy’s Venezuelan accent and our Chicagoan neighbor offering us sausage as a midnight snack.

I’ll miss my roommate. She’s cooler than James Dean, and she makes the idea of having my own room an undesirable one. I’ll miss the perpetual ring of her Passion Pit alarm tone that always wakes me up but not her, her Arizona Tea bottle collection, her Christmas lights and her numerous potted plants that adorn the windowsill.

The residents of 12B have become my surrogate family. They let me put all my intense collegiate aspirations, successes and failures aside to partake in the joyful un-productivity that is our common room, where the boys spend their time playing Robot Unicorn Attack. Homework completion, therefore, becomes a lost cause.

My memory fails me in recalling how exactly we all became such friends. I don’t remember our first meals together, nor how 5:30 p.m. in the dining hall became an unbreakable habit, so much so that if I took my meals with another I got looks of scorn and an “I see how it is.”

We have our lives planned out so that they’ll intermesh down the road &- Arielle is going to be a criminal who will rob Andrew, who will then hire Giacomo, the future lawyer, to get the stolen goods back. Luai will be in the CIA in Qatar. And Ross, though he got accepted to Columbia and Brown Universities, will be living at home if he keeps playing Pokémon.
On 12B, we are there for each other. When Lauryn gets sick we buy her chicken soup and honey. When David is performing we buy him flowers. We share clothes, laundry soap, sponges and our deepest, darkest secrets &- though mine was exposed earlier than others (re: my lack of cleanliness. Said David of my room Friday: “It’s looking strangely clean in here! Well, except for Anne’s side.”).

Of course it will be nice to be home listening to crickets instead of cars, enjoying clean sheets and an oven, but I’m more than happy without those luxuries, sitting on pillows under fluorescent lighting finishing the last lab reports of my life and pondering the meaning of Dante’s “Paradiso.” Life here is about people, and meeting others from all corners of the world and all walks of life over Wheat Thins and Kraft cheese is just as important as my school work. It’s the people that make me want to come back. The college degree is a decent draw, but if we can’t enjoy where we are and whom we’re with while on the way to the top, well, getting to the top doesn’t sound like much fun at all.

Home is where the heart is. It’s cliché, but if I’ve learned one thing in college thus far, it’s that it’s true. I came from a class of 100, and amid BU’s nearly 18,000 undergrads, I was lucky to find a niche in which I never had to be homesick. My floormates don’t mind sitting on a floor covered with shoes or on an unmade bed. It doesn’t matter to them if I fail biodiversity, and they couldn’t care less whether I spew out literate vocabulary words. They’ve been the best part of my year.

I thought Boston was boring, that I needed the real Eiffel tower, not a Citgo sign, to get the most out of my young years, so I spent much of the year dreaming of something better &- of taller skyscrapers and British accents &- when what’s best has been down the hall the whole time. I don’t need Ivy League preps walking around in crested Rugby blazers any more than I need the piers and palm trees of Santa Monica to have the best years of my life; I’ve had everything I need and more right here, in the corner of a building designed by a prison architect.

I wonder if next year will promise the same bonding. I imagine BU’s size continues to shrink as time passes, seeing as Warren Towers was a daunting giant when I first saw it. I’ve yet to learn how to chat it up with my fellow students in the elevators, and I don’t know everyone in the dining hall. But I’ve got my floor.

Four in the morning comes pretty quickly when spent with games, good friends and overpriced City Co. Oreos as it was on Friday. And so did this year’s end. Thankfully, my college experience is nowhere near finished.

It really is good to BU.