Washington

I take one long exhale, silently expelling vestiges of home and comfort from my lips, and brave a single glance up at the daunting brick facade that will shortly become my place of residence. I could see the air I had just taken in release as a puff of white fog. I never had this temporary ownership of my oxygen back home, but here it was this wild agglomeration of all the life breathing around me, capturing the air I had now marked and similarly tinting it a different color – it was tangibly a product of one humanity.

Traditionally, humans promote the fact that college is the best four years in your life-a challenge to one’s tightly held beliefs and a dispensary of experience aimed to expand ideas. I had many feelings toward this new environment. I could see the next year as life in a new city, days spent with people previously unknown, adulthood in a way of shedding dependency, a paved path constantly oscillating in every direction-but I instead stomached anxiety unsure of the way my own identity would weigh against others. I could not try to valuate every person I met, ranking them on some sort of convoluted scale. I would have to try to understand others with the lens of their background, their culture and their ideals.

It has been a few months since moving to Seattle and each day I feel farther from California. The city is a true blend of its people, individuals of every socioeconomic background walking the same streets, awaiting the same bus, drinking the same coffee-yet each different in the way they walk, the way they wait, and the way they drink. I have seen individuals on the brink of breaking, grasping the feeble thread sewn to the ground in hopes of change, but knowing that thin walls can only stand for so long. The people here are undeterred, hiding their worries and fears and frustrations in a way of seeming impenetrable, and intimidate me in their adherence to their shell.

I often meet people from India, starkly different in their behaviors and personas, distancing me from my cultural roots and urging me all at once to have my parents retie me to my heritage. I tell them to speak to me in Gujarati, as if that alone could connect me to these individuals who had the courage to embark on transatlantic travels. I pray that when I go to India one day, I could feel even a little of how they feel toward their home country.

Just like the California sunshine that would spread its rays for days on end, Seattle clouds cover the sky with equal tenacity. The days it rains, it pours, transforming a campus of hooded students bustling across the slippery ground to get to class. And then the next day a glimmer of light might shine through the stain glass window of the library and heads that had been looking down may pause to rejoice that the sun is out once more.

On occasion as I walk to class, I am greeted by the distant peak of Mt. Rainier, painted in white snow, and I am reminded that the world’s beauty is everlasting. Whereas back home the seasons melded into one relatively warm atmosphere, the trees change here from time to time. From green to orange to fallen remains of dampened leaves, seasonal shifts transform Red Square’s migrants as their pace quickens when drops of water pour from the sky and slow when the square glistens of the daylight. I tucked my umbrella away the first week of college upon realization that real Washingtonians embrace the permeating wetness from rain, rather than try to avoid it. I am beginning to recognize rain with some normalcy washing over me.

I have had to learn to enjoy my own company in college. Unlike high school, in which I was left alone for brief moments throughout the day, this is a place of both, isolation, and endless company. It is easy to think as though you are some token fish in a deep sea abyss and such thoughts provoke immense fear as I aimlessly work and play with the end goal blurred in its fine lines. While I know what I want, how I think continues to change every single day, and with that comes the maturity that I do not know everything and that would have to be okay.

The PNW is a new place that slowly is becoming the home I had envisioned. In my small cubicle of space, shared with my two roommates, I am amply content with the private ownership of my desk and my bed. I love that I can open my window to a quad of other students, peer at silhouettes hunched over a book or standing with friends. I often ogle at the blue void of cotton ball clouds or at the white vacuum of tear drop drizzle, and bask in this new city that I get to explore.

Seattle hues are truly the most diverse in range and upon serious reflection on the opportunity living here provides me, I have come to realize that the state is enchanting and that I will be the pioneer of my own experiences the next four years.