I have been in college all my life.

Though that isn't entirely true, I have spent a little more than seven years now at the same place. That time has been split almost equally between being a lost undergrad and a grad student only slightly less lost, watching this campus and my involvement with it change dramatically. Even today, as I wander past familiar landmarks from the past, a bygone era takes over at times and I find myself wondering which class I'm late for...

Except that I don't really have to do any more classes. The reality of eighteen credits a semester, unbelievable now, lies buried in the same crypt from the past that houses the recitation and lab sessions, the nights spent downtown and the disoriented weekend afternoons. In its place instead is a more regimented life - as ordered as a graduate student's can get - where the order comes not from a binding schedule, but a depressing sameness to the goals. Paper deadlines, weekly progress meetings and Sunday evenings that alternate between the panic of reality and existential angst.

It wasn't always this way. Those were less settled days, each new semester an adventure. I suppose the saddest part of this tale is the fact that when I really ought to have been writing about how much fun every new day was, I was busy churning out papers for ENG 105 (Advanced Freshman English) at  2am the night before the deadline. But then that is a reflection of life itself, for we are least likely to introspect and put things together when we are doing the living. It is only in retrospect that the best moments in life are worth any presentation at all.

Alas, I stray from my thesis. I still remember that first tour of campus, all of us still in school, just out of the 11th grade. The temperature was an obscene triple digit number, and yet we walked all around campus following a freshman obviously used to backpedaling. High-schoolers in the company of parents, we had little chance of drinking in anything but the traditions described to us on our tour through America's top party school. And with the enthusiasm of impending youth still untinted by the cynicism of approaching age, we wanted to jump into all of them and more, ready to part with our time and innocence just for a chance to don the school colors.

The embarrassments of the past are now worth writing about, too. How I turned up at the Math Tower for my first ever class, only to be directed instead to the Physical Sciences building where a sophomore outside the assigned classroom practicing his Kanji script threw me off again; a discreet classroom for Discrete Math. Or the time that I pooh-poohed the potency of Tabasco sauce and slathered a liberal portion on to the last remaining slice of pizza. Oh the humanity of it all. There were girls present.

Back on track. All that is gone now, and only vestiges remain. The weekly support for Football, no matter how badly the team is doing. Except now, we actually watch the game in its entirety and analyze the plays and the standings. You still run into the odd known face, increasingly off campus and leading a life completely different from yours. Every new visit to campus brings with it the discovery of a new building, or the heart-wrenching realization that a place you spent hours in is no longer part of the University's scheme of things. The people you spent that time with are gone, confined to Facebook status updates from different parts of the country; the classes are gone, having served their purpose as symbols on a transcript; most of the popular joints have disappeared, our money gone towards building monstrosities for a new generation. 

Do I wish I were back to being an undergrad? Every single week. Would I go back to it? Not even if I had the chance. Nostalgia, a longing for the past, is the most natural of all human desires. But like seeing a child grow or an old lover age, being in the same place and watching it change engenders the one mechanism most capable of holding that yearning at bay - it swaps passion with acceptance.

I have been in one college all my life.