moving to new haven

or: undergrad has finally ended

photo credit to my mom & her iPhone

Around one a.m. on Monday, I moved out of the room I’d spent the past two years in. In an effort to be a good citizen, I wiped down the hardwood floors, gathering up clouds of dust and hair. I felt like I should be more sentimental—that I should imbue this removal of self with more significance. When I was a kid, I hated absolutes, permanence, and even now, I refuse to get tattoos for the same reason. I always wanted to know I could undo my steps, even if time only flows in one direction.

But I wasn’t sentimental. For the past few months, I’d had this sneaking suspicion that the party had ended a while ago and I hadn’t noticed until the confetti was strewn across the floor and all the guests had trickled out through the backyard. Due to my time away from MIT, most of my friends from college had already graduated and moved on with their lives. I was ready to move on, too, and even if I came back in the fall, it would be as a graduate student.

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I’m subletting an apartment in New Haven for the summer with a close friend, who is starting a PhD at Yale. Really, I could’ve been anywhere this summer, and there were many practical reasons why New Haven was a good choice: it’s less than a two-hour train ride to New York City, where my younger brother is staying, and where there are many, many things to do. It has a much lower cost of living compared to NYC and Boston. My friend has a car and we want to explore nature on the weekends. (Also, his cat is adorable.)

But I suppose the more abstract reason why I chose to live here is because I wanted to spend the next few months immersed in my own intellectual pursuits, and I wanted to be in a college town with lots of other academically-minded young people. Yale, unsurprisingly, has a much more robust arts and literary scene than MIT, and I wanted to take the chance to explore that.

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I don’t know many people in New Haven, so I finally caved and downloaded dating apps. This was amusing for about one day and then I could no longer ignore the glaring truth that this wasn’t what I was looking for. There were people who were fun and interesting to talk to—invariably, they wanted to meet up, and I wondered if they wanted to meet up because they also thought I was fun and interesting, or because they wanted sex or something and didn’t give a damn about who I actually was. (And you might be thinking, Rona, just ask them their intentions! But many people aren’t transparent about what they actually want, right?) The entire dynamic made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t looking for a significant other; I wasn’t looking to date at all, I just wanted to make new friends, and this was a misguided search.

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My friend is looking to buy property for his next six years here. I’ve been helping him search for homes, and yesterday, we went to our first showing. Gorgeous three-bedroom condo a ten-minute walk from Yale, central air, two bathrooms. Going for over $400,000. My friend thought maybe he’d be buying in cash since interest rates were so high.

We asked the real estate agent a bunch of questions about sales tax, the electrical wiring, etc. and he seemed resigned, like, these kids. I did feel like a kid playacting as an adult. In my other life—my life back in Cambridge—I was searching for graduate housing, looking to rent a room in an apartment for less than $1200 a month. I really didn’t have any business talking about thirty-year mortgages when I didn’t know where I’d be in three months.

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I live in a beautiful sun-filled loft now, with exposed brick walls and art deco furniture. It was so easy to let my previous life dissipate away—at least for the time being. I’ll be here until September, and in the meantime, I plan on reading, writing, coding, and cooking. A summer brimming with indulgence and curiosity—what could be better?