Mc Master's
I think my luck started to turn when we got assigned this dorm, in the twilight days of my miserable junior year. The year had been bad for so many reasons I can now assign, post-apocalyptically, with collected clarity. As much as I adore SLC for its education and wide-open sense of learning, it can be a difficult place socially. To any alumni who wasn’t drunk all four years, they know that’s like saying the West Bank is an iffy neighborhood.
The story is typical – my junior year was mostly crappy and depressing. I didn’t talk to the people that could help and soothe and rescue (my parents and Beth) and I spent far too much time talking to people who couldn’t (names redacted). But then I got back for my senior year and the tides had changed. I had a confidence I’d picked up somewhere in the lowest depths, I had stopped running the newspaper which freed up, oh, my entire life. And I was living in this fabulous, fabulous apartment with only two other people and a turn-of-the-century greenhouse out my back window. It was the very last year McMasters was standing, and was all mine.
This view is still precious to me. Walking across the Slonim House lawn on my way back from class or conferences or coffee, looking at that old sloping roof and knowing my bed, my refuge, was there. I had a fire escape landing outside my room, with its own door and everything – and although my two uptight roommates didn’t like me using it since it didn’t lock from the outside, I used it a lot anyway.
It’s a pity that the apartment was the scene of the total dissolution of a friendship with a girl I’d known since freshman year. If I can speak in therapist-talk, she stopped being able to handle my truth just as I was growing the balls to show it, all the time, and damn what people expected of me. She broke up with me, even, in a nasty Dear John letter left on my desk; when I showed it to my therapist, foaming with indignation at the leveled accusations, Maureen wisely asked, “do you want to KEEP this friendship? No? Then she’s done the work for you.” A wise point.
It was a good year regardless. There were long talks with boys that didn’t mean too much, there were hilarious late-night photo sessions and cigarettes smoked happily off the back stairs (damn the roommates again). My car was parked right downstairs and it was my ticket to all the fun I had that year, free at last from the heavy burden of the paper. The room, in my memory, was always littered with color test prints, piles of clothes, and nothing but true friends. It’s a trend I’ve held onto.
I know SLC needed the arts center they built on that lot, but I wish that apartment was still there.

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