An Open Letter to the Quad from Your Ex (Resident)

Dear Quad,

I miss you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. I miss you and the million little things that make you everything that you are.

I miss you in slumber. I miss the silence hanging heavy in the air, so absolute I could hear the crickets chirping and the stars twinkling. I miss waking late in the morning to my alarm instead of at 7 a.m., on a weekend, to the sound of a garbage truck.

I miss coming home to you. I miss the walks back with friends or by myself, music or my parent’s voices curling into my ears. I miss the feeling of escaping the Harvard bubble, of coming home to a place that was not an extension of school. I miss feeling like a person, not a student.

I miss the feeling of belonging to a community larger than a single House. I miss the connection with other Quadlings, the immediate solidarity and its solidification on a (not that) long walk home. I miss the happily contrarian feeling that settled in my stomach as I defended you to your detractors. I miss walking into buildings with women’s names over their entryways, of feeling a connection to a definite moment in history rather than the hefty weight of more problematic years.

I miss studying in Currier d-hall in my pajamas, a blanket around my shoulders. I miss falling asleep on the table, waking up to speedwrite my essay just as HUDS starts cooking breakfast. Now, I visit in pants just a hair too uncomfortable to sleep in (the River’s made me self-conscious about wearing pajamas in public) and work with one eye on the clock, too concerned with shuttle schedules now that I don’t live a minute away.

I miss you more when it’s raining. I miss the scent of the Quad Lawn, its grass greener than any of the patches of turf found by the river, the reminder that life follows the rain. In the River, rain brings with it the stench of sewage brought a little closer to the surface and cars that race through puddles, showering me with liquids of questionable composition. They were the same storms, but you had a way of making them better, somehow.

My dreams of you are nightmares, but the nightmares themselves are peaceful. I dream of happiness and friends and normalcy, and when I wake it is with a smile on my face. A smile on my face but a hole in my heart, left when the dream dissolves with only the destabilizing sensation that, when I left, I missed out on something great. I worry, sometimes, that I’ve missed out on you and that my life is worse for it.

I visit sometimes — all the time, actually — more in a week than I did during the entirety of my freshman year. (You used to barely exist to me, but now that I know you, I can’t stay away.) I visit to see my friends (because some of my favorite people still live in the Quad), to spend at least a few nights a week somewhere other than my room, but perhaps a few of my visits are about seeing you. We were something, and as much as I cried on Housing Day last year, I don’t know if I can ever see us as nothing. I miss you in a million little ways, and as much as I complained about the distance or the mascots or any number of silly things, I love you for everything that makes you you.

This year, another set of freshmen will learn that they’ll spend the next three years of their lives with you. Some will probably cry. Some will probably fume. But they’ll come around. You tend to grow on people. (I love you for that, too.)

Much Quadlove,

SMY