I miss college.
Wow, I've been prolific lately. Anyway...I'm not sure why, but lately I've really been missing college. I freely admit I'm one of those psychos who actually enjoy classes, but that isn't really why I miss it. Lately I've caught myself thinking about the things my friends and I used to do, like heading to the 24-hour Wal-mart at 2 in the morning since it was the only thing open at the time. And that was after I was already in bed and was woken up by pounding on my door and decided, eh, what the heck. I wasn't doing anything that couldn't wait.
I've also been thinking about the places we used to go. The little local restaurants we would visit, people-watching on St. George Street, visiting our favorite stores where the owners knew our names. The waiters at one of our favorite resaurants knew we would show up around happy hour sometimes for the half-price wings and free bread with this amazing garlic butter. And we always ordered cherry cokes which they had to hand-make. I learned to tie cherry stems into knots with my tounge there on Mardi Gras one year. We convinced the waitress to bring us a whole bowl of cherries, my friend explained the concept to me, and we happily sat there and practiced until I could do it.
Good times.
I miss St. Augustine in general. On the whole, it was and remains one of my favorite cities. It's small and you can walk to pretty much all the iimportant places downtown, and that's the part where the college is. I loved living in the historic hotel that made up the main building of the school, and sitting out on the lawns on a nice day with a book listening to and watching the world go buy is a great memory. I miss the architecture of the city, mostly Spanish, with all the coquina bricks and red tile roofs. As my graduation present from college, my parents got me two paintings of the city done by a local artist that hang over my TV. I like to look at them and remember what it felt like to sit at the fort by the river with a couple of good friends, talking about nothing and watching for the wink of the lighthouse from the beach a few miles away.
I miss the inside jokes. The shared phrases and looks and things that would set us all off. I sometimes forget and will pull one out, and it always makes me a little sad when I just get blank looks from everyone around me. I have new inside jokes now, but I miss the ones from college a little.
And I guess I miss my friends. I've never been one to have a large social life. In fact, I rarely have more than one or two close friends at any given point in my life, with maybe one or two more that I'm friends with and spend time with on a regular basis. College was no different in that respect, and I actually do still keep in touch with my two closest friends from that time. But it's not the same. I miss having someone knock on my door at 2am wanting to go wander around Wal-Mart for no good reason, especially since we were too broke to actually buy anything. I miss having a little white board outside my door where friends would leave me random messages to find, or alternately, leaving those random messages for them to find.
In the end it comes down to just being a little homesick I suppose. Even after I graduated, I got a job that was only a 20-minute drive away from St. Aug, so I was still there pretty often. Now it feels so far away. No one I know is there anymore, but it's the city I miss. I'm homesick for my family too, in Tampa, but this is a little different. I always moved around so much that no one city was every really home. Home has always been wherever I happen to be at the moment. But I guess St. Aug means more than I thought it did. It sucks to live so far away that I can't just get in the car and go visit.
But I choose to be here, and I don't regret it. Its mostly more of the same things I mentioned in the previous post, about Fall, and I'll get over it. I just thought I would share.
posted by Toni @ 4:39 PM
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