I’m Still Here (for now) by Sabrina M. '21

I’m sitting in the quiet car of a Northeast Regional Amtrak train, writing a blog post for the first time in almost four years. Since I started MIT in the fall of 2015, I’ve taken the trip from New York to Boston more times than I can count, whether by car or bus or plane or train. My parents used to drive me down and back⁠01 bless them, it’s not an easy round trip to do in a single day when I first started college, 17 and still their innocent, perhaps helpless, teenaged child. The years after were filled with long, uncomfortable, sometimes melancholy, sometimes scary trips on the medley of NYC – Boston busses available: the Greyhound bus when I wanted to cut down the final one to three hours that driving into Manhattan added to commute time, the Lucky Star bus to Chinatown when I valued speed over all, the Megabus when I could catch it cheap enough, and any other bus when I was desperate and needed a way back now, with the kind of youthful urgency I could only have when every experience felt so new and every second felt like it would slip away from me, taking the rest of my life with it. For some holidays, my mom would find plane tickets cheap if she bought them almost a year in advance, and for the first time in my life, I learned to fly alone. I’d grip my seatbelt hard for the duration of the forty-minute flight, wishing I could ask the older women sitting next to me to hold my hand through my ever-worsening plane anxiety. We were going to go down as soon as we went up, I was sure of it, but I could only rely on myself to assuage the crushing fear of this knowing. Since the pandemic temporarily tanked Amtrak’s prices and I grew older,⁠02 read: more willing to spend a little more for added comfort I’ve taken to riding the train whenever I journey back. Its coastal views of the northeast are familiar to me, and its spotty Wi-Fi comforting. I don’t need to white knuckle my way through the slow, relaxed ride along the northeast coast.

I’m listening to a playlist I made in 2016 precisely for this reason: long trips between the two cities I would call home. Over the years I’ve slowly added songs to its seven hour plus runtime, and it is both an ode to the nostalgia of that first year of back and forth travel, but also a time capsule for the different points in my life to come after. There are songs that I’ve cherished since high school,⁠03 i wanna get better, bleachers songs I discovered after graduating MIT,⁠04 chateau lobby #4, father john misty and songs I once knew and then rediscovered and reimbued with new meaning as I grew older.⁠05 the lightning strike, snow patrol Right now, Sufjan Steven’s Chicago is playing through my headphones, and I’m hit with the memory of all these years gone by as quickly as the trees zoom past the train windows. I’m reflecting on almost ten years since I moved to Cambridge as Sufjan and his backing chorus chant that all things go, all things grow.

Despite the gulf of time between who I am today at 27, and who I was then at 17, I don’t feel as if I’ve wholly changed. I feel older, certainly, but not like a different person. For one, I am still living in Cambridge, a mere mile and a half away from where I first called home, in Inman Square as opposed to Kendall. I’m still a student, but not at MIT, and not for much longer. I’m still a hopeless romantic, a lover of art, a queer media enthusiast, an aspiring chef, a devoted concert attendee, and too online (although I have been consciously working on that). I still struggle with imposter syndrome, fear flying, and am prone to periods of derailing melancholy.

my first ever review in grad school

second semester review

fourth semester review

fifth semester review

building a stool in second semester

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That’s not to say that my life has remained stagnant. Since graduating in 2021, I’ve been working on my Masters of Architecture down the river at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In the last three, almost four years, I have had countless sleep deprived nights gluing pieces of models together, drawing floorplans, taking photographs, writing scripts, setting up presentations, finding perfect views, and commiserating with friends in the same boat as me. I’ve designed houses, monasteries, distilleries, community centers, theaters, churches, and a whole lot of things that can’t even truly be called architecture. I’ve logged so many hours onto Adobe’s Creative Suite. I’ve 3D printed probably a house’s worth of plastic⁠06 sorry, earth and built things I never thought I could. I finally learned how to code, despite resisting it stupidly during my time at MIT. Just this December, I presented my thesis on using queer theory to redesign religious spaces.

my confusing but fun thesis site model

the interior of my building

model photos in the dark

the site model in full

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I’ve learned a lot, not just about architecture but also about myself and what I want out of life. I’ve cried many times but laughed many more. I started taking anti-depressants, which I resisted for years at MIT, convinced that nothing but pure logical thinking could get my sadness to abate.⁠07 spoiler, it couldn't, and it probably makes it worse I now enjoy eating at Clover, something I (a bit unfairly) hated for a long time. I’ve grown out my hair and then shaved it all off. I got surgery that changed my life and my relationship with my body for the better. I performed in drag in front of hundreds of people for the first time ever, and then did it again a year later, and again. I’ve learned to be more okay with solitude, finding peace with going to concerts or movies or restaurants alone. I deleted much of my social media and started reading the news. Running, a hobby I picked up begrudgingly in 2020 when the gyms and world closed down, is now something I look forward to in my routine, and I regularly jog across bridges I once wrote about crossing, my heart beating faster and reminding me that I’m alive as I breathe in cold riverside air. I obsessively scroll through and post my deepest, most vulnerable thoughts on Strava to make up for my lack of other internet time sinks. I caught up with old classmates I hadn’t seen in years at the Mega Pi Reunion in Las Vegas. In the words of Sufjan,⁠08 and also charli xcx, everything is romantic I fell in love again,⁠09 and again and again and again  with people, with things, with life.

pre haircut

post haircut

my first drag look

my second drag look

pi reunion

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Even though I haven’t been far from MIT spatially, my life feels farther away from that time than a few miles can quantify. New buildings have cropped up around Cambridge and MIT. Places I’ve loved have closed or changed,⁠10 rest in peace my favorite brunch spot ever, city girl cafe, always in my heart renovated to accommodate an ever-evolving city. Graduate school for architecture is starkly different from my undergraduate experience in engineering, and Harvard feels so far from MIT that it still shocks me three years later. Even when I cross register for classes, I don’t feel as if I quite belong anymore, as if I am an old friend that hasn’t yet realized we’ve outgrown a certain relationship. I wonder what my life would look like now had I stayed at MIT for graduate school. I am a person adapted to a new environment in ways I don’t even fully notice much of the time – wearing too much black, taking pictures of buildings I see on the street, laughing at jokes about Corbusier.

As I look for jobs now, I realize that my chapter in Cambridge might finally be coming to an end when I graduate in May. I’ve loved living here, loved spending time with friends I made in undergrad and meeting new friends in graduate school, loved getting to know how to navigate the city streets with ease, and loved the feeling of home I got when I stared down the bank of the Charles on my way to my apartment after a long trip. But, ten years feels like a long time to stay in one place while I’m still in my twenties. I feel the itch to explore something else for a time, even if a part of me knows I might still want to come back one day. The prospect of leaving is scary, even if it feels right. The entirety of my adulthood has unfolded in this city, but learning to let go (and to let grow) is a skill that getting older has forced me to learn.

It’s hard for me to envision a future where I’m not still here. Moreso than my first graduation from MIT, the end of one small chapter of my life, this time feels like the end of an entire part of my life’s novel, looming close by with its blank title page. The last few years, though filled with hardships of their own, have felt for the most part predictable: one semester led to another, and another, and everything was quite neatly laid out and planned for the duration of my time as a student. I would complete a year and continue to the next, comforted by the seemingly endless cycle of academia and the seasons it follows: fall, winter, spring, summer. When I graduate in May, there will be no semester to look forward to, no routine to fall back into. The next steps are a blur to me, even if I feel as if I have a steadier grip on the overall qualities I want out of them.⁠11 can you paint a picture of what happiness is? fulfillment?

Even the version of me that might leave will still be the person I was. Time has molded me into something more refined, but I am still the person who loves this place. I still miss Senior Haus and the community I found at MIT. I can’t help the part of me that, whether on a walk with friends or with a first date, points towards the small stone building on Amherst and says I used to live there, excitedly, wistfully. I happily talk about my days in undergrad with the rose colored glasses so familiar to memory. I tear up thinking about all the people I’ve met and grown apart from here, not knowing what words I could say to bridge the gap between five years and five hundred miles. I long for the warm sun on my skin as I sit on the Felipe’s rooftop, or on the docks of the Esplanade, or in Killian or the design school backyard. I hold these experiences so close to my heart that they cannot be removed, softened and absorbed into the beating tissue.

But for now, I’m still here. I can’t finish my degree without a couple more classes, not that I am in any rush to leave sooner than I have to. As a final full circle moment, as a former MIT student and blogger, I hope to cross register for a writing class in my last semester. As a now outsider, getting into classes has become considerably harder (though I have taken a few since leaving), but I’m hoping that some of my last few months here can be spent walking down the halls where I started this whole journey.