a whole bunch of other emotions

            Two-thousand-and-five was not a great year.  In my opinion, this is an understatement.  It’s like saying that Albert Einstein was kind of smart.

            I graduated from high school on a warm, clear summer day in June, accepting my diploma on the football field with my 185 classmates.  The world was my oyster, its fresh buttered flesh almost melting in my mouth.  I was free of high school and the small sheltered town where I grew up.  College was my next move and the possibilities after that were endless.  I was smart, I was driven; I could do anything I put my mind to.

            Shortly after graduation, my family relocated from northeastern Ohio to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.  My dad was offered a great job and quite frankly, we all needed a change.  But I wasn’t quite ready for that change just yet.  I felt more like an adult after I finished high school and I wanted to have some fun with my friends.  So I stayed behind for a month.  My friends and I didn’t do anything in particular, but it was one last hoorah, no matter how small it was.

            In August, my sister, older by four years, left for Panama “to make real differences in the lives of real people” with the Peace Corps.  To me, she had always seemed so sure of herself, independent and driven.  I admired her and wanted to follow her example.  I even joined the high school swim team for one stressful season because she had swam on the team when she was in high school.   She had gone to the University of Toronto for college, so I turned in an application, too.  We all wished her the best of luck with as much love as we could give her and drove home from the airport with tears in our eyes.

            Shortly after my sister left, my parents and I piled into the car and headed back north.  I was headed to the University of Pittsburgh.  I was excited and nervous and a whole bunch of other emotions that I didn’t know how to identify.  I remember the total chaos around the dorms—where to get your key, your ID card, information packets, and all.  People were wandering around like a bunch of hungry cats herded by some incompetent wrangler.  Then we stood in line, hot and sweaty with countless other hot, sweaty families, waiting for the elevators to take us up to my floor.

            I wandered into my room, small, cramped, pie-shaped.  My roommate was already getting settled in.  She was a year younger, having graduated high school early, and clearly thought a lot of herself.  Great.  This will be a blast.  But we smiled and chatted and made the best of the situation.  What else could we do?  We were all a bunch of kids being squeezed into dorms about to start what were the so-called, “best years of our lives.”

            A few days later, Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana.  I had no real friends at college; I had just started to meet everyone.  I mean, I had just gotten to college.  Any calls I placed to my parents couldn’t get through.  I didn’t know where they were, if they were okay, if they were alive.  News footage of the disaster bombarded me from every side—it was the only thing on the televisions around campus.  And my sister was in Panama.  I felt completely helpless.  Powerless.  Alone.