by Theodora Hannan, USA

I’m sitting, rather uninspiringly, in my dorm room, cuddled up in bed with pillows and layers and blankets. Now, you all don’t need a description of my snug little single in Lyons, but I bring it up to set the scene for the shocking news that everyone currently abroad needs to hear: it is fall in South Bend. I know, I know, that’s silly, of course it’s fall, Theodora, it’s October — but you forget, my friends, the bipolar nature of South Bend weather. On Thursday it was eighty degrees and sunny, but it’s been raining and overcast and downright chilly for the last two days, and it’s safe to say that there’s no going back. Worst of all, I looked out my window two weeks ago to find just one tree had decided to visit the stylist and was looking a little bit on the auburn side; walking to breakfast Thursday morning, with the trees and walkways darkened from the rainstorm the night before, and the leaves falling in halos around their previous owners, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect fall day (until it hit seventy degrees by 11 am, good old South Bend).

I tell you this, not out of any sadistic desire to make you yearn for your college habitat, or to make you cheer that you are currently grazing in better pastures, but because you aren’t here. You are far away from heart and home, off on grand adventures, living and breathing and growing and becoming. You are experiencing things I never have and in a great many cases never will, and I am here, at Notre Dame, also doing things without you here with me. Each time I think about you, want to text you or tell you what’s going on, I have to pause, realize yet again that you’re not here and that you won’t be for another few months. That barrier, that separation, never feels more real than in those little moments when I just want you here.

There has been plenty of time for me to dwell on this in the last few weeks, but it wasn’t until I sat down for a long talk with one of my new international friends this weekend that I felt how real this feeling is for those of you in the opposite position just by being here. It made the word “international” much more real to me, to hear my friend allude to his family across the universe from him, to realize that it’s exactly how I feel. How people in long distance relationships love and hurt when distance does not make the heart grow fonder, how family members spread across the globe for years lose the domestic closeness that had once bound them together, how once-friends look across the bridge of the lost years and find it too difficult to brave spindly wooden boards to close the gap.

Fall here is a beautiful time, and I hope all our newcomers enjoy it before it disappears in the blink of an eye. I hope to hear stories of falls in different climes and countries in just a few more months, but until then, we must content ourselves with the worlds we are each of us living, and wait in anticipation of better things.

And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.