going back to fieldston.

It starts with a train ride. You make sure to sit in the first car. You've brought a book, or music, or a crossword puzzle; something to entertain you for the hour-long ride. The train gets crowded, crowded, crowded, people filling in the space at 42nd, 59th, 72nd streets. And slowly, slowly, it begins to empty itself again. Usually, by Dyckman Street, you are one of the few - if not the only - white person left in the car. And then, at 242nd, at the end of the line, you finally get off the train.

And you come face to face with the Hill. Walking past the bodega where everyone stops for a post-rehearsal sugar fix, you trek past the middle school, and Manhattan College, through the sketchy park where all of the Manhattan College students smoke weed in the summer, and up those fucking steep stairs to the top and ... there it is. Fieldston.

It's weird to think about all of the time that you've spent in that brick circle of buildings, sitting in its hallways, crowding its staircases, doodling on its desks, tacking posters to bulletin boards. You spend 4 or 6 six years being taught how to get out of the place, and yet, there you are again.

Strange, walking back in those doors, where everyone enters from the buses in the morning, everyone and their backpacks trying to crowd through one door. No one ever thinks to open the second one. You walk in, alone this time, and it hits you; the smell. Not that it's a bad smell, it's just an unexpected one. So familiar and unchanging that for a split second you are twelve again with a backpack that weighs more than you and surrounded by much cooler upperclassmen who are at least a foot taller and you're terrified. You breathe in again, and you place it; it smells like cold stone and linoleum. And, in a weird way: home. You lose the terror. Mostly.

You trek up the stairs and everything is the same. It's as though this school exists in a time warp, and you don't realize just how much you've changed until you come back and face those same corridors and staircases and desks and bulletin boards. But it is changed, in small ways. The faces are harder to recognize. Some have grown and matured, others are simply gone.

The auditorium - the heart of the school - is filled with ghosts of hours spent in there, freezing, burning, laughing, singing, napping. Faces and voices from plays and assemblies and simply hanging out - being in Larson's advisory means that you get to spend a lot of time in the auditorium. But overlapping that, it is filled with people, different people.

Your own face is treated as a ghost. Voices calling your name tentatively, as though you are a sort of mirage, one that will disappear as you turn your head. A teacher that you had never had in class, that you had never spoken to, keeps shooting you sidelong glances as you sit among friends in the current senior class. He knows that you are familiar, but that you do not quite belong here. And his looks voice exactly what you are feeling. That you have outgrown the corridors and familiar, friendly offices, and drafty windows. But you will keep coming back, you think. Maybe?

Excuse the odd post. I know that it sounds really strange. It rattles me, going back up there. Because with every moment, I get weirdly nostalgic. I hate being nostalgic. I'm too young for it. The Projection Room? Now it's a film lab. But I think of Ms. Mace, watching movies in there, first period every Friday with her, listening to her talk about how Star Wars is really just like the Odyssey. It weirds me out. But, every second in the auditorium makes me think of every play that I've done in there, every musical. Rehearsals with William during Threepenny when I couldn't seem to master my simple harmony. Sitting with Kay in the front row and making up stories. Chasing Tappy around the whole room after Once on this Island. Lying in the aisles, climbing over chairs. That school was - in a weird, most-of-my-classmates-forget-I-exist sort of way - my domain, and going back makes me feel a bit like a celebrity. But it's different now. And I get sad. I couldn't sleep and and I couldn't get it out of my head. I can't really understand why.