Connected Gusts

Veronica Barrowcliff

“Well, we’ll see you later, yeah?”

The wide open surroundings and the fresh air aren’t the only things that distract me.

This isn’t some lyric from the music that should have taken up my attention better than this question does.

It’s a quiet statement coming from a reciprocation between two pairs of deep male voices while I walk past, but, still, I overhear the conversation-ender, the peppy laughter, and the echoing hand clap, floating on the wind to my distanced ears.

It’s not something that needs to be said to me.

That hasn’t been said to me in a long time.

I haven’t had the pleasure of finding or making contact with a new group of people in two years.

My ears perk up while my head tilts, and I get my eyes to unintentionally scan over the crowd.

From my periphery, I recognize a big group beginning to disperse from the gathering. The two boys fist-bumping to one another; the three girls let a lasting giggle ring in the air as they, too, separated, calling out with eager tones to talk at some other point in the day. There were so many pathways splintering around a central courtyard. So many paths that they could travel from; so many pathways that they could travel into and reconnect in some space.

I watch the group leave one another. Only the group I first saw is not the one I imagine while I stand, going rigid, as if I wanted to move to make myself present with the circle walking away from me.

I flinch, twitching just slightly, like I was meant to copy this crew’s movements and statements.

Like they’d once been around me as well.

My friends don’t get to see this interaction.

And yet, I reach out for them anyway.

With the joyful call to reconvene, I imagine that same expression muttered to me by my own friends. The hugs I’d get, swaying in my friends’ embraces as we spent minutes relishing in our being together, besides the way we’d spent almost a full day together already. The way I’d smile with glee at the endearing kisses that would be blown to me while I watch my friends all starting to walk backwards, still facing me, yet making themselves move back to their car in which they’d come in the first place. The “see you later. Bye!” digs into my chest all the way back to my dorm room. The lonely walk taunting me while my eyes skim over the groups or duos I pass; I try my best not to physically sneer at the crowding walkers enjoying themselves, readily overtaking the minimal and narrow two-person walkways.

Common phrases for meeting with a friend, or maybe even a new associate – that you’ve enjoyed their company for the time being. May even want more of it, in the case of close friends. Being as humans are habitual creatures, sayings like “see you later!” are often followed up with appropriate gestures. A hand shake, a clap, a fist bump, a bro hug; a general hug (strength is up to you), or a push away out of humorous annoyance, are all ways in which we become affectionate enough to push or pull our friends to us. Anything you and your recipient are comfortable with, you will do with one another. Any form of these greetings, goodbyes, and everything in between, will increase a closeness between you and the one you care about.

This has a drawback. Too much friend time can get overwhelming. Given a certain amount of social anxiety for a person, too much time around people in general can be overwhelming too.

That is how I react, my eyes tearing away from the smiles and the close encounters. Airpods plunge into my ears to avoid the ringing from laughter or the chatter made by the overwhelming population which I envy now that I have to spend my few years around the campus.

The Airpods don’t help.

Neither does the way I’ve unconsciously scrunched my body in on itself. No matter the vast, extensive space of the 269 acre campus, or the even larger expanse of the sky above me, I do not stretch myself out.

I do not open myself up. Not awaiting, not accepting a connection to glide to me as quickly as those bystanders who are connected pass me.

I’m repeating the echoed giggles and the conversations I should not be thinking about from passersby while walking.

The central hub of campus – of potential interaction – blurs in my mind as I’m walking away from everyone.

Trying to get home – alone – as fast as possible.

However, we have to take in the consideration that “Being lonely is deadly. Loneliness is just as bad as smoking,” as one of my previous Psychology class lectures determined. Humankind has maintained a pack sensibility since the evolution of our ancestors. So humans need intimate relationships; remaining in social isolation is a hurtful equivalent to social dysfunction – the incapability for keeping up with socialization and influential interactions with those around us. Excluding socialization from our habits will doom our connections. As one Psychology construct, the Proximity Effect, dictates: We like people near us; the more we see and interact with people, the more likely we are to be friends. The more we are with our closest friends and loved ones, the less likely humans are going to be creating harmful situations for themselves.

Unfortunately, I will admit that I have not used one of my favorite habits – to help me keep my mind off the large groups – enough. Ultimately, I’m keeping myself away from the same grouping structure I know I need. Without the proximity of anyone around me, I don’t even have an imaginary friend to join me on these nice clear, sunny, or clouded days. The way I’ve affected the Proximity Effect is becoming ineffective to me.

I’ve made it my habit to walk around the peaceful Sonoma State campus, registering the sense of being lost, thoughts associated with loneliness swirl around in my head, bringing with them the same crunching feelings. Sure, I have my own crew of four friends, my pack, the “gang” that keep me company. Though none of their physical forms are with me on the campus, they’re still maintaining a relative connection. For the time being, lost and alone, but within my own mind fog, I am always found and in company; imagining scenarios, for now, of who I’d walk beside, or face when I’d return from the serenity of the vacant pathways. How many people I can call out to with the happy “hey”s I used to flinch at when I heard them from others. 

The more I’ve been near friends, the less likely I imagine interacting with people; the less likely I’m becoming a friend myself.

Distanced, I started taking up gazing at the sky, the vast, ever-changing gradients of blue shifting before my eyes. Fluffy clouds pushing or pulling together across the sky.

Sure, they don’t necessarily get the “see you later!” sentimental luxury that humans get. But they are a mixture – a mingling, if you will – nonetheless.

A sky filled with matter composed of water vapor, and particles of ice, dust, or sea salt. Clouds can be seen in various states within the atmosphere at as high an altitude of about 20,000 feet. As such a collection combines and then begins rising into the sky, its content will begin to temper itself to accommodate and match the temperature for the surrounding winds. Something a secluded individual – like myself – may do when they want to fit into a group of new people. Or it could be something you’ve done for yourself to match your friend groups’ multiple shifting personalities, keeping yourself connected within the mass.

While, sure, they don’t particularly hold identifications: names like Alex, or Morgan, etc. like we human beings do – respectfully not counting the technicality of cloud identification through Nephology, the study of clouds – there is still something to be said about their commonly occurring – more or less – groupings.

Some clouds fade away without even coming into contact, so to speak, with other fluffy cloud formations. Even if a tiny wisp of a cloud can get whisked away half a second after it forms, there are still clouds that condense among themselves, forming their own little groupings. Just as the clouds fade in the atmosphere, our memories fade as well; after meeting a person for the first time, they can fade as swiftly as a cloud in the winds of the sky, meanwhile your identity can fade the same way for that person. Or the same person can float closer to you, beginning a chance for the both of you to experience a bond, maybe even just as strong as the hydrogen that comprises a beautiful cloud.

I watch these clouds, separating with no care in the world that they’d done so. I can barely have time to realize that they’d even been together to begin with, let alone were able to disperse so quickly when the wind picked them apart. There’s no consequence for them. No necessity for them to come together at all and enjoy the unity. They don’t have to run into a room full of people, only to want to rush out of it within seconds, because the feeling of self-isolation would be a much more preferred feeling than the requirement that they’d need to make a friend or two as fast as they can. In reality the people around me embody these floating creations every day.

Every day I meet new faces. That’s the point of a college campus after all. That’s the reason that I chose to watch my physical friends drive the hour away from me; their cars the wind that spreads the friends apart, and back to houses that I can only get a quick weekend trip to visit. Leaving me for longer than I thought they would while I only had four stuffed animals to comfort – and antagonize me – in their place until their next return trip (if there would be one).

Well, “meets” is a very strong word. But I recognize new faces, until eventually some of them become familiar enough to me to hold a place in my mind. Others are only voices, which I also know may never be repeated again. But some of the faces I see may never be seen again, with the ending of semesters. Even with the end of regularly scheduled classes. A two-to-three hour-long class is a great amount of time to see people; see them, and consider who will still be with me when the classes end. An hour-long extracurricular club meeting is a great amount of time to see who can appear, and who I’ll be able to see as a regular club-goer, or a possible commonality for me to try to connect with. Although, an hour-long club that meets bi-weekly doesn’t seem like the best way to rely on consistency. Especially if the only consistency I can make out comes from me with my head down or my hood on and focused on nothing but the duality of hysterical laughter or exclamations from exuberant attendees against my own deathly, non-committal silence. After attending a high school club, with minimal connections made, I’ve never been one to chirp up the request for sharing contact information between any club-goers. I always figure one of us would disregard the contact anyway and then we’d manage to ignore or forget one another as time went on. As soon as I’m released from class, as soon as the club is let out, so are all the faces and voices who haven’t gotten the hold in my mind.

My stomach lurches, the weight falling down on me, and I let out a growl. Without ever turning back, I kick myself all the way home for not chirping out a “hi” and making sure faces get seen. I kick myself even harder when someone – a person I thought I wouldn’t see until the meetings begin again the next week, calls my name with a friendly tone, and I cannot call the stranger’s name back to try to keep the air in my windpipe and the breeze of a conversation flowing. When the stranger walks away slowly, the “have a good day” stays in the air, and I think that the stranger is floating away from me faster and farther than they really are.

There are also these multiple clouds, staying condensed among themselves for a long while after their first meet. While they condense together, their connectivity also allows them to construct a shape between the collected mass. From certain intricate shapes high above the ground, or even shapes as ambiguous as those from a Rorschach test, a gathering like that can illustrate so many things.

Especially when it comes to anticipating an invitation for you between a new group.

You never know where all of these clouds of groups could be able to take you.

You never know what type of shape, and personality you could find yourself among.

Not unless you take it upon yourself to keep up the interactions, keep staying around those who you find.

Then you and your group will expand. Several intimate shapes being designed which can only be for the better.

There’s a phenomenon known as Pareidolia, where you are able to see common things as images within something else, and the clouds we see will sometimes reflect these phenomenal patterns. Sky dinosaurs, sky bunnies, sky hearts. We’re astonished by the images from these clouds that appear based on the composition and the structure that forms from these already abstract creations in the sky. Personalities become revealed through what we find amusing from these sky designs. What we see just might reflect what we imagine for ourselves.

We then may begin to interpret our cloud-gazing to reference our own interactions. With just as much fluidity, we can react to a person and their time spent with us to either become astounded or disheartened by the encounters. We’re able to see someone in a new light, re-shaping how we’d met with them.

Date: August 16, 2022. New Start Day! Move-in Day.

My family is buzzing with more anticipation than I – the newly-admitted Sonoma State student has. That feels like a bad sign (I know they’re doing it in fun, and with love, but still).

Campus will be packed, bustling. You’re going to have to be careful and considerate of all those moving in alongside you.

The Housing Department recommends this while transferring to my new environment.

My family – at least three of the six full household members – are also advising this.

No one wants us to butt heads when the four of us – plus however many movers accompany the housemates in this space – take shifts to settle an undetermined amount of our belongings to and fro frantically.

I am never going to be one to argue with this thought. This is the last thing I want to act on for beginning my first independent interaction with new people.

In reality: No. I’m warned to be careful; I just don’t have anything to worry about. No, I don’t have to be careful.

Five women have already gotten a headstart days before. Some could have even had at least a full week to make themselves comfortable with their new home. There are several students who’ve moved in before me.

Compared to the recently accepted Junior transfer student, the five other women, all of them my juniors as far as ages and educational years are concerned, have had the rigid schedule to get themselves situated for the new school term. While I, on the other hand, had an easier, more lenient schedule for moving myself.

This is a brand new house.

“First floor: one double occupancy bedroom, living room, kitchen, dining room, and patio. Second floor: two single-occupancy and one double-occupancy bedrooms. Tuscany Village housing is available for sophomore and transfers. These spacious townhomes are a place for the whole squad! Six students will have access to 1,500 square feet of living space on two floors where each bedroom has its own bathroom. In addition to a furnished living room, the kitchen is equipped with Corian counters, stainless steel appliances, and a breakfast bar with stools.”

As bare as can be until someone arrives to revive it for a semester, maybe two.

What I was happy enough to transfer into during my journey of independence when moving out to college. Taking the Village’s house tour ought to be almost as uneventful as an open house from a realtor. The house being just as “new” and cleaned to be blandly presentable for incoming students.

They’ve all settled in; with nothing left for them to unpack, they’ve been talking amongst themselves in the spacious living room common area for who knows how long when I enter the door.

Which makes my entrance all the more uncomfortable.

Although the summer season led us to the campus in beautiful natural weather, what should have been a perfectly adequate cloudy day became overcast as a single swirling puff followed along with me into the living room.

Even when there’s nothing and no one to feel claustrophobic around as far as the abundance of movers and belongings go, I still have to search the two-story apartment to make sure all five of my new “roomies” are accounted for.

I had leniency and two whole days to transition toward this moment.

Time to meet my new housemates…

I barely register whose voices connect with which face. The only thing I get met with are names.

After I get names, they all disperse, diving back into their respective rooms like some unknown burst of wind demanded they go in and stay there instead of roaming about.

I barely have time to smile, I barely have time to remember their name and offer them my own. I barely have time to blink, and everything and everyone in the common area has disappeared to settle me into a fog for the day. Even in it’s amorphous state, the fog I’m left in stabs me in the heart, sending me stumbling back a few paces until I try to regain my footing and peruse the common area, with what little hope I had left seeping out of my heart, to make sure the meeting I had was real and not just remnants of a mist that I’d been staying in – the now fading wisps of my exciting move-in daydream – during the drive up here. I give my family the first uncertain shrug out of what I would have never guessed would become an uncountable number of shrugs to reciprocate these miniscule interactions from now on.

Is it to give me “privacy” so that my family and I can unpack my things, and spend the day getting settled and acclimated to my new campus life? Is this what they’re doing to give me a chance to rest for the day?

Leaving me, the newcomer, to already decipher that I won’t be able to meet-and-greet like I’d always imagined those college Orientation programs – much less this entire dorm moving process – would be beneficial for me.

The “hey, I’m so-and-so” is already wafting out of my mind. While I am focused on the other task, my capability to keep these people separate and know who’s who to better get acquainted with for the next four-to-eight months has been dashed.

For the next four-to-eight months, I don’t get a chance to be around these new people. 

Not in the way to have meaningful, and more impactful conversation-starters.

I’m beginning this brand new campus-wide journey. I’m starting out newly acquainted with next to nothing.

I sit on the couch across the way from the kitchen, the open-concept layout to the common room giving me plenty of space for a small sliver of privacy and a standard vantage point to see the commotion nearby. I’ve watched where all five close housemates were conversing happily amongst themselves.

The five new potential friends are friends themselves. What can I start that they will find enjoyable enough to keep focused on?

They’ve known each other longer. There’s no way my current standing with them these past four months, or the next four months with them are going to be enough time to hold a candle to what they have going for them to consider friendship. Or even what my four friends and I have had for as long.

And who’s to say it’ll be enough for me to consider it a friendship?

It’s not going to be as valuable as my own pre-college cloudlet of friends, going on ten years.

How am I supposed to start shooting off to try and make friends, when the only potential acquaintances-to-friends people around me are overrunning their own conversations with the others closest to them?

I tap-dance and scat to myself on the couch, trying to distract from the disregarding roommates. Although I ultimately wind up sighing like a massive deflating balloon as I keep my eyes glued to something else so I’m not glowering at these people.

All of them… Ignorant of my presence, while I am equally not involved by choice.

If I’m investing myself into making sure I get included in conversation, then that just means I might put too much pressure on these people to see me, who might continue to disregard me because of my hasty interaction.

I sit, imagining myself within my outgoing father’s or grandmother’s shoes. I want to feel my body move on its own.

“How do you talk to people? You just do… Things just come up from starting a conversation; you never know where or what talking is just gonna lead into.” My father had advised automatically when I investigated the ease with which he just struck this ongoing discussion with random strangers that he won’t have as much of a privilege as I now have to spend a year’s worth of time with. From cafes to restaurants, to an out-of-state dog-walker on a weekend, my father will never miss an opportunity to present a whole speech for this unsuspecting person (even when it’s me or my family he just spontaneously babbles to).

If everyone in my family already finds this method of interaction awkward and embarrassing for each of us as well as by their empathy for the sudden recipient, then why do I want to go out of my way to extend this queasy feeling for others to experience in this brief moment?

We’d just forget any of us had actually been talking in the first place, anyway, right?

Let them come to me. It should be easier that way, I try to tell myself. Let someone else expose themselves at random so that I never have to just butt in unnecessarily. Oh, yeah. That’ll be so much better. Let’s see where that gets me: Beginning acquaintanceship? Ending fireball of embarrassment?

Only to gain the reply of an identical silence from all of them.

When I’m trying to not run away into the security of my room, my eyes caught onto a few of the hanging pictures decorating a wall. Several exhibitions of either the collective tastes, or the individual tastes, of some of these housemates.

Several posters or trinkets along walls, or the side tables, or the countertop, led my mind to wander into several different sets of questions or imaginings for how my housemates have their memorabilia.

With so many pieces of decor along the walls, I was also unconsciously half picturing the posters other dorm-owners had situated in this dorm’s past. How my current sightline of pictures has been covering up other “Swiss cheese” – as my father likes to joke – dings against the walls where so many more sentimental tapestries have been held before.

My heart clenches with the thought of who had come before me. Who had entered this very dorm and may have left it years later alongside the roommates they’d once shared it with?

This has technically become a home for me for now. Just as I’m allowed to hang pieces from push pins like my more familiar home room is cluttered with, I should be able to push a pin into the wall here.

I’m getting to know my housemates. Why can’t I let them get to know me?

Why do I not want to express myself, hanging my own sentimental memorabilia to show these women, try to gain common ground, or at least acknowledgement, before it’s too late?

Then, with a line to frequently see into each of my housemate’s selective rooms at any given period, I turn into my room.

My housemates’ choices of decoration involve decor plaster overloads. Intense amounts of proof that these rooms are going to last for a long while. And there’s nothing to determine that they won’t be maintained and decorated any other way in homes for the future. Whether they like their officially temporary living space or not, there’s something to be said about how everyone is going to see it from now on.

And then there’s my room.

The “Swiss cheese” pin-pricks mocking me against every blank yellow wall.

I want to prove that this is officially temporary.

I want the other slightly darker shade of sunny yellow.

My home-away-from-home means nothing.

I want my true home.

I scanned them until my eyes couldn’t look at them anymore, the spiraling questions and comments I could make dissipating. When I turned away from the makeshift miniature gallery wall, my eyes caught onto another decor item, the TV situated atop the living room’s coffee table. I stare in a numbed trance at the reflected girl, almost to the point where I could pretend it was my family’s TV, which I would happily sit and watch along with the smiles and laughter of my family. With the smile that broke out on my face – I didn’t even care if five women collectively saw me grinning and staring with wide-eyed glee at nothing, like a madwoman – I couldn’t help feeling a prick by the corners of my eyes; I was zoning out too far and thinking too much about my family of five around our comfy living room. Away from the stiff common area couch, I was on the plush couch from home, fluffy carpet under my feet, where I could happily sit beside a family whom I was proud to say could rarely stop a conversation. Much less like the sinking, void feelings emitted from the conversations I’d heard from my housemates, more than leaving me dejected with enough, even if unreasonable, reason to disassociate myself.

What do you guys watch? What do you guys watch? What do you guys watch?

What do all of you like?

Come on, say it!

My mind replayed several possible starter cues for me to convene with the new strangers. Something my father and grandmother have appeared to have no problem(s) with what-so-ever. I begged my mouth to open, to start word-vomiting as seamlessly and carelessly as my family does it.

But I do care.

I bit my lip instead.

Instead of seeking out my family, I have to resort to Google: How the hell do you introduce yourself? What the hell are decent icebreakers for meeting new people?

I won’t be joining them downstairs. They won’t want me with them. It will be nothing like the beaming peace I feel when my family copies each others’ laughter to a program. I might not laugh at what the new girls laugh at. What if I find something enjoyable that they don’t?

I can banter with my family because they’re family and it’s comforting to be fun with them.

It becomes uncomfortable faster than I anticipated when an unexpected question rushes in a blast out of a housemate’s mouth. In answering the inquiry someone else posed about my family before I could reciprocate, I begin biting my lip again to try to stop it from hanging agape with my surprise. I blink away tears, explaining my family life to this stranger to an extent, rather than standing in front of my far-away family during the same moment in which I’m getting closer to talking to a new person.

And yet every time the housemates laugh from their own entertaining activities in the dorm, I want each cackle to almost summon my family members so I can laugh with someone I know. I can’t make light banter in this room. There’s no comfort with these women here.

I care about intervening where I feel it’s not my place. Which makes it so that everything the group comments on is not mine to piggyback on.

I want to value their privacy. I can’t interject with something. That’s inconsiderate of me, and I won’t even know what to say about what they’re talking about anyway.

Not to mention I was called out for wrongfully “interjecting” on what someone considered a private discussion once already. “Hey, can you please not eavesdrop on this conversation. I feel like I can speak for the other women here, too, when I say I feel it’s an invasion of privacy.” Understood; I get it, I’m sorry. What I don’t understand is why you decided to make me a sixth wheel in our six-person “inclusive” dorm group chat to a private conversation between the only five women who would want to have it.

My body trembles and my lip quivers fiercely when I try to make the words “I’m sorry” for these women.

Won’t be doing that again.

But I need to make a comment.

I could lose my advantage to experience Pareidolia. There’s already a commonality among all of us individuals: we live close by one another – not just from the perspective of dorm-living, but within California cities. I have to be able to find some idea of a common thing with something else about these two drastically different sets of five people over the course of the next two years. I need to see something that will sometimes reflect a pattern or interest of mine. I want to find a way to recreate the same sky hearts that my friends and I’ve shared for the past ten years. If I can’t find some relatively solid advantage for blending among the various misted puffs that I see before me, I’ll wind up continuously blinking at a clear cloudless sky.

Before it’s too late.

And I wind up sulking into the solitude of my room. Better to hide in my room, so I can give people their space without being a hovering eavesdropping creep.

And hide with it the tears clouding my eyes.

My room, which – in a stark contrast to the available views I get into my other housemates’ rooms – was as bare as if it was still staged to appear like it were still a room to gain. Compared to the other housemates I’ve had, my room was probably the only one that gave enough comfort to me, yet still managed to look as if it wasn’t even lived-in at all.

But of course, I would live in it for the next year.

Having to act out an imaginary conversation with myself.

I never knew how astounded I’d become when I was able to finally catch on a gust of wind, using it to blow me into my common area; to make a shape between myself and the time I’ve spent speaking to my housemates recently. After my first conversation ends, the second is always with my mother, relating my amazement. The memory of the meetings with housemates is recalled and re-imagined in the smile on my face with how I’ve been gliding into new territory in a better, and more effective way.

With the clouds forming fun funky shapes across the sky, it appeared a rarity that I would get a glimpse of the shape it took on. Until I was able to see. Until I caught sight of one. While some people walking past me may glance at the floating mass somehow staying in the sky, or never consider them – or me – at all, this is the only image that I’d rather watch. The curves of one of the nearest connected, and still collecting, masses remind me of popcorn. The kernels of something being created anew getting combined into an imaginary bowl for enjoyment. The enjoyment like I imagine: sitting with my friends, hearing them laugh with me, watching a movie on a couch. Together.

Just like the image your expanding friend group can imprint on, not only you, but the world around you. Like a cloud, giving off your identity – personally and as a part of the group – for the world to view.

Interesting enough, my main clouds primarily came sweeping over to me – or I may have come swirling over to combine with them. It had only been sometime through my four years of middle school. As quickly as I started talking, I started accumulating my friends, which I’d spent the rest of my middle and high school years beside. I smile, thinking back on how my group and I each reflect so differently for the days in which we’d met one another. The memories I hold are all those of my happy-go-lucky rambling like my family is very frequently noticed to communicate.

The years now feeling like the same single day that a grouping of clouds became clustered together, before separating from each other as a night passes.

My sister, another cloud that – even if she’s my identical twin, she is not my identical cloud form, is another gust that influences me and expands on my life, as vast as the sky.

M. I’m biologically the older twin, but you wouldn’t know it if you met her before me. We’ve literally been together all our lives. We’ve also heard the enjoyable phrase “Mirror Twins” used among our family to help describe the both of us. We’ve played together, child-like and in soccer; we’ve gone to school together, although we disconnected around the beginning of our community college education. Even if we’ve started pulling away from one another like cotton candy – starting in the drivers’ seat, and stretching like contrails into the long distance separating us through San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, respectively – her bubbly personality is something I still try to mirror.

I like to think that I agree with her on a lot of ideas anyway, and I look to her a lot whenever I need guidance, inspiration, and a healing hand. Which means that, while both of us are amorphous in our own ways, her strong-willed – and her quirky – personalities make her one of my many rocks to stabilize my floating actions.

Then again, our ages are tossed out the window into the sky when we’re meshing together after being such individual puffballs anyway. Neither one of us really acts our age all that frequently, preferring the old days of ten-years old and younger rather than twenty-three and counting. If she’s not working – again, being the more mature one than I am – then I always try everything in my power to get her to hang out with me, so we can be goofballs together. As with all my friends, my smile never fades whenever I see or am near her.

Along with my sister, three friends are as integral to me as water vapor is to a cloud. “I would say we kinda feed off each other’s energy and bounce off each other. Like a hive mind,” as one friend has expressed of our dynamic. Man, I love the Proximity Effect when I’m around these three. Even though I know these friends aren’t as close to me now – the hour’s distance between the five of us not as long as it could be, and yet just as long and disparaging as if I’d never met friends in the first place – our relationship still layers over me like a beautiful puffy cloud-covered sky.

My friend K. Along with the rest of my pack, he and I are equally imaginative and expressive in the creative department. Just like my sister, M., I can rely on K. with moments requiring guidance and inspiration. Given our adoration for reading (more so than the other two friends and my sister), and our preferences to the creative, he and I are known to exaggerate our reactions for the extreme scenarios we’d read a day before, or bounce ideas off one another to help with processing works-in-progress creations, or just rant over decision-making processes when we’re working. Despite each of us being in separated, yet respectively distinguishable connected, writing circles and workshops during some of our education, dare I say I seek out and adore his commentary even through the extensive amount of peers and beta readers I’ve had before.

All this to say that, while I envy his work ethic and dedication (even if he doesn’t want me to), I couldn’t be more proud of the work that K. has been putting in to be able to put himself out in the world.

My friend B. Ironically, we met her when she confused M., who she shared a math class with, and me from the time we spent together in an extracurricular middle school club. Essentially like what M. and I had in our youth, we’ve gone on to extend the connectivity toward B.: sharing multiple school classes. It was in one shared class in high school where I learned just how ambitious she can be, and just how impressively her dedication can influence me. Until I had to separate from her, too, after community college; although she helped everyone else extend the contrail between us that would eventually become my independence.

Like K., she had been a creative writer. While the hobby has fizzled out more for her than it has for K. and I, she has transitioned into another creative field in which we all dream of maintaining the pack connectivity. Exuding Pareidolia, re-imaging ourselves and our ideas between one another through interconnected media: mine and K.’s personal Creative Writing experimental projects meets M.’s and K.’s interpretive artistic designs, meets B.’s empowering Film techniques.

Just as I do with K., I would cherish the opportunity to collectively work together because I adore both K.’s and B.’s zeal and creations.

And, we’re obviously, especially alongside the other three, going almost anywhere with each other. We’ve been inseparable friends since – she’s literally commented on more than one occasion: “I don’t want to lose any of you (me, M., K., or P.) If I lose you guys, I won’t have anything.”

A statement which I agree with and reciprocate.

Eventually, she found herself among a different, new, and growing group of people during her’s, M.’s, and K.’s collective time together attending San Francisco State University.

I couldn’t be happier for her, or M., or K. for putting themselves out there and expanding their social network based on enjoyable hobbies and creative endeavors. While I sit, quietly inching my way into attempting to enter this same circle, but beaming at my friends’ personal enjoyment with these new people nonetheless, I can’t help wondering how I would react if I were ever to put myself into the identical situation that gave my sister and two of the three friends such impactful connections.

Personally, I don’t know what I’d do without M., B., K., or P. either.

I’ve been with these three friends since middle school, so I’ve been keeping them close, and have not been feeling such a strong pull toward dedicating myself to another relationship. How could I even begin trying to break new ice with someone else on my own?

But I know for a fact that whatever I would do, it won’t be able to create as quirky a shape out of amorphous collections. Or it just might not feel the same as what quirky activities B. gets the gang into.

“You do goofy shit. Then we all wind up doing goofy shit because you just did goofy shit.” I’ve joyously explained to my friends and family from past a fit of giggles when they all spontaneously ask “why are we like this?”

We’re like this because the Proximity Effect determined that we like being around people who are quirky like our quirky.

My friend P. We happened to meet when I recognized her face somewhere throughout middle school, but didn’t want to screw up finding her unspoken name. I just happened to ask her a simple question. While we are just as good friends as I am with M. and K. and B., P. and I still miss each other. Just because we fell out of touch after we graduated from high school doesn’t mean that I’m not still happy for her and the way she’s been enjoying her life after having moved away from us to attend Oregon State University, and then relatively stay in Oregon.

She does return home to California frequently, and I need to make a point to regroup with her to catch up.

I would never want Pareidolia to impact the way I re-imagine myself or the way I memorialize my time with these beloved friends.

Like the Proximity Effect expresses, the presence of friends can lift us up and brighten our days. Conversely, there is truth here as well: We can also try our best to brighten a friend’s dark moments. A friend may have a moment they won’t wish to share; a cloud may have a sliver of a dark side to them, which is all we may be able to see from that one angle. When one of my friends needs the time to vent or send us the “🫠,” after we let all the “oof” joking responses out of the way, we give them the best comforting responses we can give them then.

Or you or your friend could be stepping into a room, brightening it up, like clouds can always be rimmed with lines of sunlight refracting against them. Clouds can also cool and warm the Earth’s surface, given certain temperatures. So not only will the interactions you have with friends brighten your day, but friends can also essentially “cool” you down on a more stressful day, or “warm” you up for comfort and relaxation, in a sense as well. When I almost always virtually yell “I MISS MY FRIENDS OR FAMILY,” that outburst is always followed up with “🥰❤️,” and, even when I expect this reaction to come (and know it’s the best I can get while I wait out another week or so before I can see all of my loved ones in person again), it still warms my heart and manages to relax me to know that they’ll all be here for me.

In any case, while at least my friend group hasn’t expanded out so much yet (even when my friends now are already excited about future friends that I can “bring into our group” from all my time spent up at the school’s campus), I’d still like to think that a friend’s presence can help us grow, and we as a group can help each other thrive, like clouds can often be seen growing in the sky.

Alternatively, there isn’t much of a case to be made, and not much can be said to connect these emotional attachments when I interact with the housemates I’ve been living with this far. Sure, the case will be made that all of them are friends already, so they all will share and reciprocate some of these same emotional investments with each other.

I’m just not around to experience them for myself.

Not a lot of the good ones at least.

Before I moved in, my mother and I started chatting about my new life. We each expressed our version of events that we both hoped would happen for me based on some idealized presentation of what moving out to college could look like. Although, ending my final year at Sonoma State two years later, and looking back on that day, I don’t even believe anymore that I had even known about other presentations to begin with; like what she and I both wanted had been based on nothing but a dream sequence.

Which makes sense.

After that August 16th day, when all was said and done (and the lie I told myself about college life had been brought up to campus with me), I might as well be a ghost to these housemates. They’re with their beloved groups and I’m just detached from them.

When the pressure to be talkative and friendly wears off from the 16th, they all shapeshift back.

In continuing to convene among themselves, they disregard me.

And when we all actually are together, out of all the components of a cloud (water vapor, ice, etc. …) of all the women I live with, we’re only able to exchange nothing more than a reciprocal “Hey…” among the haze between each of us every once in a while.

While I fidget, my body tingling, hands trembling as if I’m in an Old West stand-off, and, despite obviously being near these groups, I find some random thing to busy myself with or stare at to avoid their presence. When they arrive, in a space that we can all inhabit – silence and all, I try to will myself to act faster. Rushing around the dorm as fast as clouds dance in the sky to remain just as unseen as I believed the housemates themselves were considering me.

But then again, I would still replay my thoughts on how I’d interact with the housemates. Eventually, my mind doesn’t even zip through ideas about communication anymore. I accept this self-imposed silence.

Until eventually, they’re all ganging up to meet me with either shunning monotony in whatever they say to me – or worse yet, with venomous tones of voice, or direct icy silence. Looking at me like I’m the epitome of their brand new, already predestined bad week. I always established that they were probably dealing with their own situations.

But I still haven’t been able to speculate why they’d be taking it out on me.

What was I to do to help them relieve their stressful circumstance? If they weren’t going to be communicative with me to express as much of their slivers of darkness, or their shimmers of sunlight, or their gauging cooling/warming temperatures as far as they wanted to, for the rest of the semester, or the long year to come, then all I could do was try to disentangle myself from the scene before I was a victim of their powerful bursts.

To the point where whines and groans puff out of my chest whenever I’m interrupted from going about my day by necessity – and yet simultaneously, disdain – to reveal myself to the common area, where I will nonetheless meet people who won’t even acknowledge me the way they do each other. When I make my way into our dorm or the shared common area, air always leaves my lungs in a heavy sigh that I’m hoping isn’t loud enough for the crowd of the housemates to hear, let alone consider that they’re the reason I’m sighing so deeply.

Eventually, when my skin manages to stop crawling, I just go numb in the silence. The awkward, disparaging silence I’ve been situated in from the totally unresponsive housemates who haven’t even regarded that I’d entered this common space. Then, my feet pick up the pace long enough for me to just maintain my objective and I can continue to not socialize.

Thank you, guys. How inviting. So much for helping to warm me up or comfort me during this new stressful transition.

With this small-community campus, my friends have been encouraging me to find people within the cirrocumulus cloud – “fish scale”-like, close-knit state that some cliques and friends stick in. Wandering the campus, watching these bundles spread around me, the crunching loneliness washes over me again, even as I try to drift away from those cloudlet (small clouds) groups.

I don’t know them; they don’t know me. I’m not a part of their group. I can’t – I won’t just wisp along until I converge into them. I won’t fit this circle. Or this one, or this one…

With my current friends supporting me to make new friends during the school year, I’ve found myself looking back up to the sky, stuck in thought over my past relationships.

Now, I’ll be honest, as an introverted individual who transferred into my journey of independence when moving out to college, I was more so opting (and quite frankly pleading) that I would receive a single-occupancy room.

For peace of mind.

Breathing room.

And to help ease my way into the brand new scene of dorm life, and living with multiple new people during the first school year.

Entering into my first semester on August 16th: I received the randomized result of the first-floor double occupancy room from one of Tuscany Village’s suites.

“You’ll get to experience living with a roommate. You might gain a new friend real quick while you’re in the dorm with them.” My mother and grandmother, both of whom agreed with me that I could test the individuality of a single room before branching to a double if I chose, were eager in trying to persuade me to stick through the decision.

I had high hopes that that would be how my college experience would play out, too. I opted to not make a motion to fill out a room-change request form upon moving in.

I did try to make a start with one of my five Tuscany housemates, at least.

She had been a transfer student in the Fall like me, so I enjoyed that we might have a chance to talk over our transfer experiences. And she reminded me a lot of my family members, which I really enjoyed. From the one week the Transfer program allotted our Fall ‘22 Orientation, I was sitting beside her, listening to her tell stories about her driving experiences – like my sister, and her enjoyment for sleeping in – like my mother. She definitely embodied the Pareidolia phenomenon.

Then she huddled into her room, and kept to her own busy schedule for coming and going between the dorm. Or not coming to the dorm, as a few of the housemates at the time would do, staying in other friends’ suites for a period of time.

I never spoke with her after that.

Although I’d seen her with other students whom she’d quickly accumulated as friends, walking in front of me toward the center of campus, or sitting somewhere in the Quad, I sensed that I would never be able to reconnect with the Pareidolia wisp that I had briefly met the week before.

Then she moved out altogether.

The dorm she and I “shared” was insufficient for her. She met me personally to describe how her upstairs living arrangement was allegedly incompatible with her personal work schedule. While she’d – poorly, via text messages – requested a swap between myself in the downstairs double suite with her from the upstairs double suite, for the sake of convenience, I declined. “We’re halfway into the semester already, I’m already situated comfortably here in this space in the dorm.” And I knew and agreed with the reaction my family had: no way we’d move me this late. Even the roommate I was staying with at the time emphasized that “if she was in my shoes, she wouldn’t switch.” Not to mention the headaches from the contractual standpoints. I was assigned this room, she was assigned her’s. If she wanted to swap rooms with me, then that needed to be a beginning-semester preference and discussion, especially among more witnesses than just me and each of our respective roommates. Why even bother trying to go through the hassle of coercing me into an agreement that’s just as incompatible as your room already is? Not to mention that the Housing Department would either do one of two things. Rightfully not sign off on this spontaneous and undisclosed switch, since she claimed we could leave the arrangement unannounced, and it would “be fine.” Or, “for the sake of convenience,” I just might have to be the one who got the short end of the stick and was moved altogether into an entirely different environment to accommodate her request for my half of a room, if it had been accepted, that is.

I was not even re-envisioning myself inside a new apartment while I ranted in irritation with my mother, rolling my eyes while I groaned, over a pacing fit within my room to blow off steam from this gut-punch.

Meanwhile, she took this disagreement and prepared to move herself out into a new dorm which her newly acquainted friends occupied.

Giving me the cold shoulder for the rest of the semester until she abandoned the dorm two weeks before the term’s end.

Until she, too, walked away, and left me to sit. Daydreaming about the family that she so easily reminded me of. Within her, I was able to find so many of my family members, which was helpful when schedules and the hour-long drive wouldn’t do for visiting me.

Although, to be fair, when the hour’s drive is inconvenient for my loved ones, that makes the duration of my campus life all the more harder. With all of them disregarding my invitations for spontaneous and intriguing events throughout this campus due to their conflicting and dedicated work schedules, I feel all the more obligated to shrink myself down into an invisibility in this deserted dorm.

So the one chance – the 1-in-6,000 chance I recognized and felt was the only opportunity I would have for such a rapid, successful meet within this campus, had vanished without a word.

One second, the tiniest poof was there within this great sky, and I had gotten to know her name.

The next second, after turning my head to pay attention to something different for a minute, the poof had vanished.

A cloudless sky returned my stare.

I was left hanging.

Week two of my very first semester (Fall ‘22) at Sonoma State University. I immediately became the only person staying within my dorm. Waking up, I’d be making and eating breakfast alone, then returning into my room to do schoolwork in almost silence (with the exception of my enjoyable music). Now, my housemates obviously still came and went at any time. With their own routines and schedules – work or personal circumstances popping up that I never wanted to pry into – and my not having much of that commonality between us, each of them would all but vanish on weekdays. But for a majority of that semester – since at the time I’d only had one in-person class to get to – I was spending my time alone in the dorm.

When I was younger, I never liked having to stay anywhere by myself, slowly awaiting a fright that I often considered inevitable with someone’s return from an outing. There’s that, and there’s the banter I get from my family for reminding me of how I would wander aimlessly, eventually finding my young self mysteriously far away from my concerned family, in certain locations in my past. They all tease me while I have vague recollections of walking into lonely store aisles, well past where my family had recently stepped. Nowadays, oddly, I find the times being separated from others restful, I’m able to relax, without so much of the torturously, intensely lonely feeling.

I knew I was thinking about it, the other women in my dorm being away; how the others were doing; what classes they were in; what they were doing during their hang-outs with friends – while I stared out my window, with my clouded mind trying to overcompensate the preference of my workloads to distract from the chilling silence. Unavoidable. And I shouldn’t be thinking about it, stressing. Wondering when I’d be jump-scared by re-appearances, my roommate, or the housemates of the upper level. Not that they’d ever intentionally explain themselves and their adventures to me anyway.

My roommate, a woman who could have become my first friend, given mine, my mother’s, and my grandmother’s anticipation for the upcoming year, it turns out, had not even spoken a word to me, and in turn neither did I to her, for a larger majority of the year we spent together than I’d like to admit.

I was expecting to meet new friends and for housemates to be sociable.

I would have accepted the heart-stopping recognition and, after taking a minute to realize the inclusion between five women – if they had ever taken the step toward me themselves either – I could have tried my damndest to integrate myself into the circle as well as I possibly could have given so many new people.

But I just didn’t go to make those new friends by myself, either.

I don’t want to bother interrupting other people and their circumstances. Who knows what will come of it, if not for instant intense disregard and shunning away from me.

Turns out, my hermit personality is far more overbearing than the extrovert lifestyle my father and grandmother embody. Which reveals the results that my living in the individual single bedroom could very well also become more exclusive than I hadn’t realized before. And could also make for more exclusion between the women who lived here.

Nevermind the way I feel somewhat better to not be social altogether rather than to be going around literally and figuratively stepping on anyone’s toes among the common spaces. Nipping at my bottom lip and sighing in quick puffs, I squirm in the common area. My mind orders my shuffley feet to try to keep still so I’m not intensely dodging the other feet that I hear but won’t visibly gauge where they’re going in relation to my destination. Within just as much time as I’d entered, my body races to try to wriggle me free from this straight jacket of silence.

Why the hell would I go into this brand new experience and instantly directly tell anyone (let alone different sets of women within my two years of living in a different place) how to live their lives? They do their things, and be themselves (as challenging as it may be for me to witness sometimes), and I’m doing my own thing, working on my own terms. Being only Veronica, as my family has obviously invested I be.

Two years ago, you didn’t care about what people would think of you.

Why have you begun hiding yourself now – helping people disregard you – because you don’t want to… what? You don’t want to embarrass yourself?

Not much for getting acquainted with my new life, is it?

Week two of my second semester in Spring. I already began to ask myself: can’t I live in an apartment by myself already? My older sister bought an apartment for herself and a friend. Maybe I should ask her what that feels like, being solo and away from loved ones.

Like I’ve begun to feel prepared to be more alone.

Well, when I initially wanted a single room to breathe, and be independent easier, and breeze my way through the first year, I might as well have gotten it by the whole dorm’s eerie silence. Goosebumps prickle up my skin, and, for the first time since moving in, I feel air filling my lungs again, exhaling into the abyss, without a clenching paranoia that I won’t ever breathe when these housemates are around.

Alone, but at least, not forgotten. With my friends already chittering eagerly about researching apartments to split rent among the four of us.

I decided. I think I’ll now call my room my “hunker bunker.” It’s not only my literal source of shelter for the next year while I finish school, but because I’ve found myself leaving it just as rarely as I had during my very first semester, with the obvious exceptions of leaving for my in-person classes. With the amenities, including my own mini fridge, I’ve hunkered down so much, I may have just found a way to shrink my “spacious” living quarters down some? Should it feel right if I enjoy the space that’s the equivalent of half of a room over the larger space for wholesome entertainment and camaraderie? Forget about the common area – the living room I never enter and relax in anyway, I’ll be comfortable lying on my bed or sitting at my desk. The smaller space to my room – even with a roommate making appearances – was something that I managed to still make accommodating for me. If I had – almost – everything that I essentially needed inside this confined space, then why would I exit this bubble of mine, anyway? Especially if there’s going to be nothing but silence and abandon from outside anyway. I was able to make the space suit me as a cocoon to protect me from the howling housemates’ voices or screams, or the clustering, bunching feeling I got when the wind was knocked out of me every time I hear my – our – bedroom door open for the roommate to arrive out-of-the-blue.

Yes, I still needed the larger common area fridge, and to wash dishes.

And yet, to my surprise, whenever I would enter the common area, to the sight of no bodies, my mind would play tricks on me, popping all those little, bug-like black specks onto the corners of my eyes, like any motion or shadows detected would be housemates.

Turns out, those “specks,” or shadows would often just be other passersby from dorms around the courtyard.

I’d watch them entering their own dorms, wondering what their situations were: were they living better in their shared spaces than I was? Were they all enjoying themselves because of the proximity offered them from the collective six-person living space?

If I’ve been wondering about others’ campus living situations before, I’d enter my room, and all those inquiries would be forgotten.

Although, technically, I had a home with a six-person occupancy, metaphorically speaking, the room I was placed in – and already had an obligation to share – was occupied by four other bodies. I don’t care that at least five other women see that I’m twenty-two years old, and still host stuffies on my bed.

When I would hear the echoes of front doors bang shut from wind through my opened window, part of me wanted to imagine I’d just heard my front door open and close. With the cheery sound of a family member’s “hello”s filling the room to ask who was home.

The home an hour away would be better populated.

But, then again, since I am confined to my side of the bedroom, my side is still relatively nicely occupied when I see my stuffies, the friends who gave them to my new arrangement “with me in spirit.”

And then nobody was home. And I still stood in the deserted dorm.

Oddly enough, begging myself to leave the building like everyone else had. I didn’t have anything to do, necessarily, to warrant my leaving. But I had to go get out of the house anyway.

And obviously, I needed to go outside.

There are days where my separation anxieties kick in and I would prefer to enjoy the company of my three friends and/or five family members in the building, or on campus with me. I would rather them than the company – or what passes for it – here. From five housemates I’ve roomed with so far, understandably given everyone’s scattered schedules, there’s not a lot of company to keep. Every day, I’d prefer my close company even more than I would the birds who chirped cheery greetings to me in the early morning. Every night, I’d prefer my close company even more than I would the crickets who’d sung to me from outside in the evening hours after I got home from class during my first semester.

Since my departure to college, and because of the separation between me and my family members, my mother and grandmother have been adamant in trying to get me to “branch out,” expand my horizons…

As if college isn’t enough to enforce that I do that myself on its own construct. That’s the entire point of a life on a college campus with a college educational track. Experience all new things. Experience life. Experience yourself. Grow.

It’s not that college never crossed my mind, considering I’d been finishing two years of community college by the time my Mom and Gram were helping me search for campuses close to home. Two years ago, Mom and Gram had been insistent that this experience would be good for me, since I’d never been by myself. I can get a chance to live life outside of my then-twenty-one years in Dublin, CA.

Not only do Mom and Gram intend for this to be a “fun experience to gain independence” that I’d previously not had, they mean making new friends.

Another task that I have found challenging among my college education progression.

As I think back, I establish that I was the one to break every one of my friends out of their introverted shells to connect to me. Which I find to be a striking contrast to my older sister’s recent assessment: “Your social skills aren’t as good as they could be in regards to speaking to people you don’t know.”

But I feel like the pit in my stomach among the void of new engaging experiences is still valid.

Since my twin and I have moved to separate university campuses, my grandmother mentioned that this is “the first time in (at the time) twenty-one years that M. and I have ever been apart for such long stints of time.”

Which really plucks at my heartstrings.

And will still ever after once we all continue to separate.

Having been with my friends for ten years already, it’s true that I can’t see myself with anyone different.

Or am I just in denial? People want to stay with friends if they’ve already been together that long, right?

I hope that’s the case.

I can understand that, if you have to, you have the ability to dissect yourself from a relationship. And I empathize with moments when you can grow apart from a friend, which lets the relationship dwindle.

So this brand-new first on a separated campus that I get the chance to delve into after ten years is unexpected.

You can be shocked and, slightly heartbroken, if you’re encouraged to suddenly take a step away from ten-years worth of a friendship into new territory, something that you found unexpected. A position you hadn’t fully considered for yourself yet, but, with similar supportive coaxing, you do feel could be beneficial for yourself.

Right?

And yet, the nudge from Mom and Gram, and even from my sisters, especially M., and my gang, pushes me into the campus anyway.

Leaving me wondering: if I’m, essentially, becoming a brand new individual, then what can I do, and who can I meet?

What will I experience in this world for myself, for once, different from those worlds and experiences of all of my friends?

How well will I do by myself, for the first time in twenty-one years, while these two years go by?

Besides the five-housemate experience of Tuscany Village, the unexpected introduction to a roommate, and the fortunate experience of somewhat returning to in-person classes – a 50-50 split between my four classes – there are also events and gatherings promoted for campus and the smaller Village community.

Now while I was unavailable to attend a majority of these events my first semester (because my previous class schedule was in conflict for almost all of the events’ timings), this second semester I had some luck.

The walk is longer than I always expect it to be. Like I’m walking a trailhead from my grandma’s favorite familiar lake; it’s the idea that it always takes longer going toward the destination than it takes when we really start leaving the destination.

Thirty steps and we’re there. Ten and it’s like we’re back at the parking lot already.

Though not really. It’s an optical illusion, the path an ever-extending hallway.

On the way, my head swings up and down. The meetings are held in the relatively dark evenings, so no one’s really coming and going as often for me to notice – not that I’d stop random people on the pathways and strike up lasting conversations at seven o’clock at night anyway.

I try to remember that this walk will take longer, and I don’t want to miss my meeting spot. Which I always tell myself I’ll miss anyway. The direct shot from the roundabout walkway that surrounds the fountain leads to this meeting room. Only the meeting room itself isn’t parallel to the fountain. It’s like walking through a line of stores in a plaza and all of the storefronts advertise themselves only on the overhead awnings, so you never know if you’re walking to the right place when you first go. Not to mention all the storefronts are painted the same color. With the stores being so tightly connected from the plaza, you also don’t imagine the amount of space one store would get in comparison to others. After wandering around in the partial alleyway, believing that this building was totally interconnected to the rest in this gap, and, therefore, massive, I make the right turn and shuffle into the room, quartered off in an almost indistinguishable corner. No wonder these don’t get enough occupants; if this is the room everything special’s being held in – let alone the only space for interesting events like these that I’m attending, then of course people would get lost.

I sauntered into the room, which was larger than I believed before I stepped into the threshold.

And yet, despite the size of the room, there was absolutely nothing to fill the room.

While I was able to attend a few of these gatherings throughout my semester, the attendees were themselves sparse. And even then, I was still shunning myself.

As hyped up as these events claimed to be, not even the walls were accented in any fashion. The base color along all four walls was never covered up in so much designs or art works as what was hung along the walls of my dorm, or framed on a majority of the walls at my home. The sunny yellow walls of the room, trying to brighten my day, only shrink me back into the same sunny yellow of my dorm living space. My mood falters in favor of stepping through a doorway that allows access to the same sunny yellow of my true house.

Four easily accessible folding tables are either set up in rows, or halfway scattered in awkward angles to the room. Like even the tables are waiting with just as much anticipation for potential “party-goers” to fill each of their eight-to-ten-person lengths as the hosts who’d set them up are carrying.

When in reality not even so much as an inkling of paraphernalia could rightfully occupy those tables to the max.

To the immediate right of one of two pairs of large glass double doors into the building is a welcoming table, situated with snacks – depending on the event in question: cookies, chips, or sodas. Beside these, a single sheet of paper is laid out with an adjacent pen, informing every student who enters to give the paper their signature.

In the relative center of the room stands another table. A projector is perched high in the center, displaying an oddity of motion, either in some technological game start-up, or from a screening the hosts intend for us to watch.

For a building that appears like it can take a maximum capacity of 90 occupants, I’ve barely seen over ten people coming in.

Certainly, there were no other students to meet, let alone to greet in this situation.

The tables counteract the chairs which they’re set up with: more formal, sturdy, comfortable chairs that even I didn’t expect to combine with folding tables like these.

Like a last minute attempt to throw together a welcoming extra place set for unexpected guests from a dinner party.

The flyers sent out seconds before the beginnings of these events had once implied thought and intention: a serious dedication to planning for these dates; a potential for extra oomph on fandom extravagance; de-stressing and relaxing passersby. Everything about these events within the room as I entered in the moment emphasized the total opposite.

Like they didn’t even want to set up for guests.

When I’m done debating on the snack I want to carry with me back to my room, and scanning what all the tables had to “offer,” I meander past some students who still chose to stand for a minute beside some of the tables I’d just been past. Out of at least ten seats per some four tables total, I stand for a minute as well. I rock on my heels, and my hands fiddle with a fidget spinner that I’d tucked into my hoodie kangaroo pouch before this occasion, my eyes making a triple check of all the things part of me can’t help but contemplate how much I’d enjoy. I try not to pace every square inch of this room and then the outside of this building, waiting for someone to arrive, or something to catch my eye in a force to get me to contribute to this evening, instead of wasting it. Thinking; debating. How should I present myself for this event? Who all is going to “meet” me, and I them? How badly do I want this – this insistent reclusive presentation right this minute? Until, only after I’ve spent just under half an hour out of the event’s time slot, I finally make the commitment to occupy one chair along with four to five others.

The other tables are soon filled with the same nondescript chattering from an equal amount of people as at my section.

And I freeze. With my puckered lips, I try to will my muscles to not contort my facial expression into a scowling look of curiosity. People are near me… Speak now! One and only option. Go! Go! Talk! I was not a part of any of the chattering. Which made this event a little less worth it with every passing minute.

Can you even talk with your R.A. outside necessary school matters? I wondered to myself, swaying against the balls of my feet, and directly beside the woman designated as the Village R.A. who I’d previously met.

Of course you should. She’s just like any other person… Go. Say something…

We meet-and-greet shortly after my arrival when she makes her rounds and ends with me. Within seconds, the exchange of the traditional “how are you? How’s school going?” pleasantries have been exhausted and she disappears again, disregarding whether or not I’d want to keep speaking with her. At least I can check the box that I met a quota of speaking to one person in this simultaneously broad and cramped space.

I shuffled away from the one woman I felt I would have had the better of the several chances to make conversation with among this gathering – as sparse as it stood now.

I stood directly in the corner, huddling as if I was desperately trying to fluidly mesh with the wall and never appear human, or approachable, again.

As I stood, invisible, I watched the prospective meeting members trickle in: some one-by-one (perfect chances for easier interaction), or in the groups I despised. Seeing more than one person, a collective mingle among themselves in front of the refreshment table, minimal at best, I felt like fainting. My legs rooted to the spot in the corner, I never wanted to make a reach for a comforting cookie; I knew that would mean I’d have to pass the groups. Not that it mattered anyway, I thought. Groups like all these wouldn’t even recognize me and would doubtfully call me into conversation rather than my going to them.

For all I knew, if I made a move to meet them, they just might consider me another lone student who wants to share space at the refreshment table, and then give me that space. Walking away from me and my goal with just as much disregard to what I wanted to try to accomplish for one night with almost as much hope.

Instead, I stared uninterested at the table which my R.A. sat behind. As the advisor mingled amongst her own associate, I scowled down at the paper set before the two of them.

Something that I felt would have taken so much more time by signing my elongated full name to establish a “presence” of myself to this meeting; rather than the amount of time it would have taken me to stride away from the room with as much energy and enthusiasm as I held walking toward the building in the evening in the first place.

Finally, when enough people floated into the meeting room, the R.A. announced the free-for-all to the night’s creation event: a vision board collage. I perked up at this creative event. I recognized it a week ago, and always perceived something like these projects as interesting, with enjoyable potential.

Especially since (from all the screen-grabs that would pass my eyes), the campus appeared to advertise and promote more and more creative events, some even like they’d been set as annual functions, if not every semester.

Even better, I hoped I could allow myself a minute to connect among people who’d come to enjoy the same experience. I just might be able to get a little bit better insight into revealing myself across the paper we were using. Better still, the Pareidolia effect may work in my favor on account of my re-imagining the event in-progress: this moment could help shine some light on other attendees, which would be beneficial for me to see them, and hopefully gain common ground from a look at their interests.

Which is exactly what my mother and grandmother were overjoyed to hear about. They advised me to go; I did. They advised me to talk with people; I clammed up the second I sat at a table.

Take your pick of the colored papers along a table at the entranceway, then go to town with the massive cluttered magazines layering four tables, and the assortment of glue sticks and scissors for assembly.

Well, I made it into the entranceway. To stay.

Now I just also had another objective: take a peek and check who all I wanted to get to know for an hour.

Or, as was my case, take a catnap spacing out 20 minutes into the event only looking into one selective magazine; the talkative students overflowing my one table somehow lulling me into a trance. Biting my cheek, I’m just repeatedly flipping through magazines, flicking my thumb against my paper. Sitting in silence, my body is unconsciously too unnecessarily rigid, my eyes quickly glaze over my fellow students filling the table. My mouth twitching while my head nods; I’m searching for images to scrap together, sure. But my eyes look from underneath my lashes, trying to disregard my project for a minute with a focus more on the people sitting before me than I had in the moment of creation.

I guess I feel like starting to talk with people with such directness will make me more awkward. And I have mixed feelings about that. That’s literally how you make friends. That’s how my family does it frequently. Why do I shut myself up? Out of fear of what?

Like with my housemates in my dorm, I was just trying to be respectful, letting everyone do their own thing, and not try to interfere with anyone else’s pre-established groups.

And yet, there is still something in the back of my mind that makes me silently beg for recognition in some form or other. But all I’m doing to gain attention is gaping at these strangers, when I’m not staring into space to avoid making contact with the passersby.

Please, somebody, help me blossom. Please don’t help me push us apart through these horrible sustained winds.

Please, somebody look at me and don’t make us exchange awkward-as-hell, creepy half-smiles between each other in a request to return to nothing but a detached, petrifying silence. Please, somebody, I know I’m getting disregarded elsewhere, but can I at the very least not be disregarded within an hour. It may be awkward, and it doesn’t have to last if it doesn’t, but it’ll at least be happening awkwardly. Please, somebody help me get past the awkward stage in meet-and-greets.

Can someone, please, put me on cloud nine in the duration of this moment, even if just for an hour?

I can understand it, if someone’s just as laser-focused as I am on finishing their vision boards (and getting out of this building to go home at a decent hour), then I’ll let them be. On the other hand, multitasking is a thing, so why am I not keeping with that pattern like everyone else is? But if friends are friends, there’s no way these peppy people will regard me with the same energy as they interact with their closer friend for what this moment is worth. 

Until the others sitting before me whittle away faster than I could enjoy the moment of being near people like I enjoyed seeing the picture of nature which I was about to include in my collage board. The recorded images of clouds blanketing the sky through the scraps of paper are more permanent than the teasing motion that people are making coming and going, dancing in this sky, with their own creative patterns. Several sky bunnies are dashing away from me. The table is re-designed to be just as empty as the clear sky from the picture I’m eyeing. I never get a chance to see other party-goers.

By the next time I look up from placing my vision board back on the table, the table has emptied completely.

I wasted precious time, too engrossed in my self-indulged silence rather than focusing on a fulfilling attempt to communicate.

My Vision Board… what I created as a vision for my future, never held a scrap of paper that had any relative reference to groups, gatherings. Friends.

I tried not to wince over the failure I just committed to myself.

I tried not to take another consolation snack and scramble outside like a frightened mouse hurrying to the safety of its home. While I’m still sitting in a daze, I can already feel the gusts that will slap me in the face with the same contempt I’m already holding for myself while I speed like a blistering wind back to my room.

Even when my hair stood on end, I already knew that I would absolutely relate this experience back to my eager family. Maybe I can disguise it? Distract the family. Highly emphasize the intimate time I’d tried to put into creating the interconnectivity of the vision board. And reveal less, if anything at all, about the lack of interconnection I’d made as a whole like I hoped I would have upon entering the meeting.

I could sense the energy flow away from my body like a mist, as I stood by the door, turning into and out of the door frame with unexpected indecision.

Going rigid, I let others into the room. They all passed me, with my dry throat, stunned stare, and a hitch in my breath, without a word from either participant.

So as to not feel like I was stalking the incoming students, I tried to adjust so I stared at one of the barren walls, or focused on a close spot of carpet in the large room. When even the large room made me suddenly feel like I was stuck in a box, I finally deflated and set my eyes out one of the floor-length windows.

Where a dark cloud appeared across the whole sky, dimming my mood further. A dark cloud isn’t a good sign. Let alone a single one in the whole sky. I glared at the cloud, the feature taunting me with its intense, dark looming presence.

Challenging me to go inside and try again; take my pick of another vision for meeting sky bunnies and re-creating the interaction into an eventual sky heart.

Because otherwise no clouds would hang over me.

As my body sagged, I forced myself to at least look over my shoulder one last time, and my head dipped low.

I’d rather not be here. I thought to myself, my eyes squinting shut to hide the eventually bustling event.

Walking home on an extra chilly, lonely night.

I turned my shivering back on the meet-and-greet.

And let it fall against the door closing off my room. Mine and my family’s previous enthusiastic eagerness evaporated from me.

What an uneventful meeting.

Another event crossed my eyes. A Harry Potter themed event; several people would want to attend that, right? There’s no doubt. I would surely be on cloud nine – I was already on cloud nine just by staring at the newly advertised poster. I know this time that if I don’t use my buzzing excitement to go to that, then that is an ultimate failure to mingle and make connections.

Especially around something so beloved as this franchise. People are bound to be apparating to this location with the light of this community event shining against them. So many houses – guess what, in the literal colors of a rainbow that clouds’ merged forms can help make, so many pathways to walk along, tie into one another. So many characters to re-imagine as oneself, reveal characteristics and personalities, during a moment of idealized roleplaying. So many prospective sky bunnies to help merge together into a separated new, potentially lengthy sky heart relationship.

And yet, the attendance was again sparse.

I understood. I knew many students were busy and preoccupied; or they lived too far away from the meeting location; or they just hadn’t been prepared and giddily anticipating this like I had the week before.

That is, until I entered the same building as before. When I sat at a distanced table, where no one else considered sitting.

In almost as hardcore a run as the trio has to take into Platform 9¾ for seven-plus years – even striding right past a tissue-papered replica of the same brick pillar pinned to one of the walls, I take a direct line to where I can see the faint projection of the first film on the wall.

My cheeks stung already, and my smile hadn’t even grown with the full extent of my giddiness in hearing the theme ripping across the room. Even when I sat by myself at this table, watching Harry make friends out-of-the-blue better than I ever knew I would
(in the exact same bursting communicative way my family encourages me to work with), I cringed. The timeless and unforgettable vision of the child characters and the beginning of this eleven-year-old’s first adventure wasn’t what got me.

Have I been enthralled with this franchise since at least the age of eleven, absolutely. Will I attain any new hobby, or fascination, or fandom of any kind even 12 years later? Absolutely not – maybe, we’ll see.

With every scene I watched, I began tensing up, forcing myself to stop squirming with glee like an amorphous cloud wafting in the magical sky. My skin prickling as if I’d just spent time in the chilling rain. Feeling as if I needed to contain my excitement, shut my mouth instead of screaming any familiar, loveable quotes before the characters themselves even spoke them.

Not express any of my outward elation among several other fans. Yet I was among several other fans taking in this fun experience related to the franchise. Just like there are several options for the children’s animal companions before they converge on Hogwarts, there are several people here whom I have the option of talking to and experiencing this with. After all, we’re all meant to converge in this location and become companions, right? While neither Privet Drive nor Hogwarts hosted bunnies or dinosaurs as sidekicks, there was still the compelling, and heart-throbbing opportunity where any one of us were capable of taking advantage of the trio’s meeting in a car of the Hogwarts Express and re-creating it among ourselves for a chance at the same everlasting bond.

This was probably the most cloud-filled night of my life! I didn’t even need Pareidolia to take a chance and wind my way to interact with other connected, like-minded people during this brief gust to the hour-long event. Besides being a Hufflepuff – there I said it, no I will not self-sort into a different house, thank you – I wouldn’t want to re-imagine myself any other way tonight.

Why would I want to shun myself?

This was, again, something I perceived as an enjoyable moment.

Something I continued to hope could let me connect among people who enjoy the same experience.

I shouldn’t need to mandate a non-fangirl presentation of myself for the evening.

I never said a word. Spending about fifteen minutes, and watching nothing but the movie. Not watching groups; not intermixing myself to the thematic craft projects. With my fandom imagination running wild, and my own mental diagrams persisting after scanning a clustered table containing rods and construction paper, I could have made my own wand, and, yet again, gotten an idea of others’ tastes and ideas about the franchise, where others were enjoying themselves. Instead I was not even listening to chats with a plea that they’d be vaguely centered around the stories so I could try to give myself an in into making interactions on my own.

Harry didn’t even make it to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry before I made my leave. Using “I have more pressing things to do.” as a pathetic excuse, I vanished as easily as Harry hides under his Invisibility Cloak.

With only commemorative stickers to accompany me back to my room, I never meet my own Ron or Hermione.

A third event smacks me square in the face. Posted the day before, this Game Night event promises the full swing for enjoyment and de-stressing. And more importantly: interaction.

I rushed off, imagining myself jamming out to the Just Dance music and, maybe, even giving myself a chance to let loose and really shake things up with participating in the hyper dancing game.

I’d obviously still feel better if I had friends or family to join me. That joking banter about me not keeping time with the hologram on the screen; or with the tune of the song I’d sing; or the crying laughter from missing a beat; or the calls for one or the other to shut up because we’d be making fun of someone else’s distaste for a song or the choreography, would be more of a comfort from my cloudlet friends to me in the sky of strangers.

With each step that took me closer to the night’s meeting, my mind was pulling me further away from the physical pathway, into a pathway toward my house. Out of a great pile of CDs, we’d spend half an hour arguing and deciding which game to play. If we finally managed to settle on the Just Dance franchise, like I was about to experience that night, then it would be another ten-to-fifteen minutes for us to make a choice between the five optional games commemorating each respective year’s worth of entertainment that my family owned. Then we’d have to make sure we all agreed to pick our favorite songs from each of the expansive playlists, before we finally plopped the CD into the console and powered the remotes up.

All this to say, if Just Dance was what we imagined all of us playing, then it’d be safe to say that the lengthy Just Dance was going to be playing for a majority of our designated hangout.

No friends joined me. Not current, distanced friends or promising future peers.

There goes the easier concentration of sky bunnies.

I meandered again into the same meeting room, the vast and bare space becoming as familiar to me by now as a bright, cloudless sky.

Space which I was quick to skim before I made occupancy to a corner.

While seemingly currently trending pop music burst to my ears from some speaker empowering the queued up Just Dance playlist – the latest version of the game I’d never touched or even been aware of until that night – a bright orange tub caught my eye while I made an attempt to survey the games displayed for the advertised event.

Jenga!

While I stared the box down with contempt, I didn’t want to think about how my playing any of these collaborative games by myself would look.

And I didn’t want to pull my eyes away from these multiplayer games, either. Even when they were glazing over with tears, and those tears were helping me re-imagine the scene in front of me: friends instead of empty seats among a game of Monopoly.

I settled on glazing over a dotted pattern sewn into the backs of the chair cushions.

“Do you want to play…?”

I lifted my head up, still not sure if what I heard had been directed to me, or just something to be ignored, because who wouldn’t ignore me in return? Some other conversation among separated groups of friends, that has nothing to do with me. As I find the usual case most of the time.

To my shock, the question came from a pair of girls who’d been looking directly at me, watching me stare at dots for who knows how long.

My head in the clouds, I blinked numbly, stuttering as if my gaping mouth was a broken record of gibberish. Having nothing else to say, I gave a sheepish set of nods.

The two girls lit up and took off. Toward me.

Dragging me along behind them.

Here’s to hoping I can keep this sky bunny or two for the time being.

I was pulled down onto the chair I’d just been staring at as fast as rain can fall.

The girls fought amongst themselves over who would go up against me in doubles Solitaire.

The girls settle for Go-Fish instead.

To which an entire six-person table has become filled, everyone sitting with the eager investment. I once blinked and felt abandoned. Now, I haven’t been disregarded. I blink and I’m among a cloudlet, even if briefly. The clouds are dancing around this table in the eventful sky tonight!

My smile seemed to grow tenfold with each individual who made their way to our group.

Hello, sky bunny number three, four, five…

And I never personally knew any of them.

I finished the entire hour’s-worth of the event. Walking home, I couldn’t stop smiling during the entire rest of my night. I didn’t even wait to get all the way home before I unconsciously revived the Pareidolia effect. My night ends, as always, with a conversation with my mother, relating my amazement. The night’s meeting, spending time with total strangers, is recalled and re-imagined in the smile on my face and the squeak in my voice with how I’ve been effectively branching out because of the new opportunistic territory.

For once, I don’t disregard my mother, and her ambition for me. She tells me That’s great, sweetie. Good job. I hope you had fun. I agree with her.

I want more events to attend, so I can try my best to branch out and find clouds.

Finally, something different in my personality has been revealed. Sun peeks through the overcast blanket that had once followed me.

I never once looked up to see a cloudless sky.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I’m lucky remnants of the rushing winds from my walk never push me over and I never fall through the front door after stepping over the threshold when I return home. 

Huffing and puffing louder than normal, my legs burn from the persistence in my walking speed.

Why are you going so fast? You’re just gonna get to the location whether you’re lonely or with someone else. Besides, if everyone’s already disregarding you, anyway, why are you pushing yourself so hard to run a damn-near marathon to detach yourself from people?

I’m never in a rush or in a time crunch. My feet just walk faster than my mind can keep up to try slowing myself down. I will myself to keep my eyes downcast and my body moving so I never see cloudlets walking alongside me. Or I walk so fast that, since I won’t blur it to make it look like a blanket in the whole sky, I don’t have time to ever see this single cloud reappear to mock me.

Or I’m just telling myself that being as quiet as I can, and getting home as fast as I possibly can is better than being in such a hub-bub from campus.

That all depends, too, on which housemates are home and who’s going to keep up the hub-bub that I tried so hard to escape – even though there is no indication of a depleted, or even draining, social battery in me at all before returning home.

Trudging up the stairs, partially bracing against the walls and the banisters, and over to my bedroom (Finally! A single-occupancy room…), my legs feeling like they’d give out on me within seconds – I make it to my door. Thankfully, I’m able to shuffle to a spot to relax.

Sprawling on my back on my bed, I finally allow myself to go numb. I exhale several heavy sighs before steadying my breathing again, while willing myself to at least stay awake for a little while longer. Relishing in the quiet of my dorm was harder than expected, the dissipating weight from the day trying to pull my eyelids down. A sudden pop jolted me up from my bed, rippling goosebumps over my body, a burst of air from my lungs, and a pounding heart. Once I pulled some air back into my lungs and felt some refreshing air settle on my face again, I recognized that one of the doors to the dorm clanged shut and a round of chatter was soon to follow – and break the relaxing silence.

I knew I should have taken the time to wander downstairs, try to make conversation – over what I had no clue – between whomever just entered the dorm shared between five other women (the newest Fall ‘23 batch).

You wanted this room to ease yourself into the feel of new housemates last year. You had one chance, now you’re getting a second wind. But why is your door always closed to them? How are they supposed to know that you want to come to them if they just keep disregarding you because they don’t even know whether you’re holed up in your room or not?

Hey, the room itself may be more expensive. But the serenity in the freeing individualism I have is priceless.

But then again, a sort of paralysis helped me pull back where I remain on my cushy bed, which I chose to comply with instead.

AirPods make the second return to their places, tucking into my ears. A better chance to –

Shriek!

Nevermind.

There’s only so much a closed door, Airpods, or embracing “noise-canceling” earplugs can do before something eventually gets caught and whipped like a whirlwind all the way back up to me.

Even if it should have stayed downstairs in the first place.

There is not much in the way of blocking out the boisterous exclamations from these people.

It may have been a real stretch of time for all I knew, but eventually, the door made the same clunky sound it had before and the house quieted again. Where I lay in silence, again. The first silence had been comforting; this second round was far less comfortable. The wait began: where I would go about my business with no anticipation for when the door would open again. The bare minimum chance I could have obtained had clicked away from me as easily as the door bangs shut from the force of a gust of wind. A shiver lurched my body around on the bed, and I sat up, making it easier to hang my head in defeat.

I had people to talk to, I knew that, phone calls away. Even when every hitch of hyped yelling or laughter from the room below me always made me want to rush to find a time to meet with my friends through technology. Rather than hustle myself downstairs to eavesdrop – or better yet participate – in the enjoyment. And yet, I sat, putting as much distance – proving a self-imposed point and making myself as much of an outcast – as I could. The housemates I’ve had during my time on campus in this new year have, once again, been close friends, more acquainted and comfortable with each other and the small circle. It seems, rather than taking time and finding enough connections to accommodate another newcomer around the pre-existing intimacy of friends.

I had tasks to do to force my mind away from the breath-taking crippling that always managed to overwhelm me when I stood by myself. Oddly enough, as I got older, I used to find the silence and realization around being deserted peaceful, having moments where I could just be myself. Or there were these thoughts I kept spinning in my head (ultimately winding back into imagery around the territory where I was the only soul who occupied some plane of barren land). A tightness overtook my chest, battling between willing to not have the empty thoughts, or to suffer through having them. I occupied myself with a stress ball, keeping an incorrect pace between the deep breaths that I took and the intense squeezing from the ball. With each squeeze, the stress ball gets closer to becoming a comfort, almost relieving my anxiety’s whirlwind in exchange for a feeling of connecting. Not just my fingertips pressing against each other when the ball is used. But the comfort and security I feel as I hold something tight again.

Listening to screaming laughter from the room across the way, or booming yelling and cheering sailing just past my window makes a shiver run up my spine, and clouds my mind.

My body tenses again, the searing pressurized pain that had dissipated from my limbs moments ago returned as my muscles tighten again.

Craning my neck and biting my lip, I hum out my two options, staring between a closed door, and my pillow over my bed. 

Closed door – which will take up more energy to open, walk downstairs, and enter a fog of the known unknown. I’d know that no one would care to know I was outside.

I’ve already had my energy drained from getting to an abandoned home once.

Or my pillow. Which takes up less energy when I fall back onto it and dispel the tension.

I should follow the sounds downstairs myself too.

Until I do.

For the wrong reasons.

Surprise! We’re on your back patio. Come open your door and let us in. 🙂 A text in the chain from my cloudlet quartet of friends shoots onto my phone. So I duck downstairs.

With any click, be it inside or out – it gets nerve-wracking to tell – I keep internally demanding that the jump-scare won’t get me from anyone bursting in or leaving their rooms.

There’s no reason for me to be scared: we’re not going to be intensely interactive among one another. Either way, part of me keeps calling out (mentally) to be left alone within this dorm in every circumstance.

Every fiber of my being praying that I can open the door, usher my friends inside, and escort them up to my room with minimal, if none at all, contact or interaction with the five friends I already don’t know.

Rather than considering what I’m always already aware of as the sounds of joy from my other housemates – all of whom interwoven friends from too far before my introduction – I laugh with my own friends.

We should have moved to the common area. We all knew that.

If my housemates can set up blow-up mattresses for their friends and significant others spending several various nights in the common area, why can’t I for my friends?

Well, for one, I don’t have a personal air mattress. Even when I knew neither my friends nor I would have popped the mattress or destroyed the living room, I still would not ask the housemates, eager and willing to help me, to borrow the mattress.

But that just puts more potential distance between the beds’ spacing around me and my friends.

Four friends who – unlike the housemates surrounding me in this claustrophobic new year – I have not seen personally as of yet since returning to campus.

Although I do go back home over every other weekend, giving me the perfect quality time to relish in my proximity to these friends, I technically still do keep them close even through Sonoma’s location. Situating all four of my comforting stuffies, each commemorating a friend and the intricate moments all four of us had spent together to achieve those loving stuffed beings, on top of my bed. Place-holders to my real friends, evaluating how the layout would look during the night when they would eventually arrive at another sleepover.

While my room doesn’t have the same niceties as the common area, my friends still find ways to peacefully accommodate themselves (in one case, literally being more content with the “surprising” situation of my en-suite bathroom than anything else I’ve been living with in the entire dorm). I don’t have a projector like the event meeting room, or my housemates, but we make due with the floor and the simple elevated laptop for a better idea of a movie hang-out night.

We’re just genuinely happy with being near each other, catching up after I’ve been away from my house and the gang for certain stints. We can just stand in silence and it’s going to be a hundred times better than the spine-prickling silence I face when near any one of these five new, non-communicative people from the past four months.

Trying to match with the hang-out that the housemates have between themselves in the common area.

Only it turns out that, from the one experiment I held in trying to be anywhere near these five new people to interconnect, an intensely different evening played out than the ones I spent with my friends.

Music that I was totally unaware of and uninterested in I’m sure blast passed through every downstairs wall.

What music do you listen to? The only question I receive from strangers when it comes to ice-breaking.

You might as well try and yell it to the five of them since they’re all already here now and listening to this, and you don’t know how long they’ll be downstairs for. Hell, you can even ask when it’s coming from rooms all around the house.

And yet it never gets followed up with other icebreaker questions. What almost feels, somehow, like a hellish interrogation when I’m met with this is suddenly stopped as fast as I can breath. Which means so too is the chance for me to reciprocate the question.

Their idea of safely drinking in a controlled environment with their friends beside them. Only I don’t drink, and, while I’d gotten the nice and unexpected offer of a beverage of choice on more than one occasion, I would absolutely rather not have my first sipping, let alone drinking, experience with random strangers.

A night with a total disregard between the housemates and myself and an non inclusive stalemate.

Thank you all for the invite. Please disregard any other resemblance of future invites to me. Sitting and watching over all of you mingle is more uncomfortable than it is pleasant. I’m sure you’ll all have so much more fun than I will. Thank you.

An evening which I spent over three hours wishing I’d never spent three hours down to try to intermingle with no intriguing outcome in the beginning. I wanted to regain those three hours, even if it was hypothetical with the four stuffed animals that made up my friend group.

With every noise under the sun radiating, there wasn’t an inkling of silence from these women. Only I stayed silent.

Separated.

Where I tried to configure the loop of housemates’ laughter and overlay it onto my friends’ faces.

We wouldn’t have a projector for entertaining movies like the housemates had.

But I could still play out their expressions when they fought one another over the TV; the ways they’d impressively battle between each other on a Wii game; their hyperactive interpretations of something they’d experienced.

Their revealing things between all of us we hadn’t heard yet.

The amount of catching up – spending time like the old, long-lost friends it felt to me like we were nowadays – with them beside me.

We’d finally set up a proper “visitation” schedule amongst ourselves. Something that seemed so much easier to coordinate than those “all-must-be-present” suite-mate agreements have often been. An opportunity for the four of them to travel together in a rough hour’s-worth of a gust to find me for a roaming tour and a day on campus.

And so I reflect, my eyes stinging with water and my shoulders sagging to follow my pouting lip, on the way that I would rather cram like a sardine into this decent-sized space, than go outside.

And so the distance between me and my four friends grows more comforting and tight. The distance between myself and the room across the hall, or the hitch of five styles of hyped yelling or laughter from the space below me, grows longer with an easy, gentle breeze.

“See you later, Veronica.”

“Bye, guys! Have a –” My comment wishing them all a good day slapped a closing door, the backs of my housemates being whisked away from me.

The spokes of a wind turbine were spinning; the motion my housemates were making to leave was not converting a current for energetic interactions. They weren’t waiting, which only depleted my energy for committing to this type of relationship. An intense windstorm pressed against my skin, powering this gap between us.

I stiffen and go silent, doing a headcount of how many clouds whisked through the door’s exit, and listening for anyone else, rather than shout “Hello!?” into the expansive void in search of some other cloud left within the dorm. As I scanned the dimming light coming through the window to the empty room from a clouded sky, I noticed a rain beginning. Though the moisture, that of a light drizzle, hadn’t come from above me in the atmosphere. But by the tears welling in my eyes, and dripping down my face.

Okay. No way am I staying in a house that’s this quiet! I tell myself, the first whispered command repeating in my head as I walk upstairs to retrieve my things.

It’s a gorgeous day out, today! My family’s frequent compliments to the weather and the beautiful sky, now filled with my new cloud friends, greets me when I step outside.

I wonder how many cloud fugues I’ll see – or keep seeing, maybe even being connected to – today.

It wasn’t until I moved here, then, that my family suggested that I get my walks in with fresh air. It’s better for me to get out of the deserted house anyway, clear my clouded head so, for a few minutes, this disregard won’t stick with me. So now I find that nature walk to be more comforting.

I get the feeling I’ve somewhat grown out of enjoying time in nature within my adolescent years. This feeling is empowered by the pandemic. Giving me and my family more reasons to hermit ourselves down and in the house. But amid the social distancing, I’d been with my family. In a peace I wish had been transferred with me to the city an hour-and-a-half’s drive north of Dublin.

I stepped outside again, retracing steps I could probably walk blind by now. Even if I may not want to shield my eyes – the bright sunlight slashing at my face from through the wide cover I thought I’d had by the trees overhead – I instead stared blankly, regaining my vision after dark blots leave. I face, as always, the miniature courtyard.

Empty.

Not that I expected much else.

The open courtyard has never been bustling or even entered for those who want to sit in leisure along the benches or across from friends at big tables.

The only one who has a desire to sit at those grand welcoming tables outside is me.

Only I can’t.

I’d only be sitting by myself, staring across a spacious resting place that could easily sit six, if not more, people.

Probably getting pitied by others who would see how disregarded I’ve been by the table.

I do not have anyone – friends or housemates of choice – to occupy the remaining five (or more) spaces.

I take four steps, retreating back into my just as lonely housing unit.

Glancing at imaginary friends sitting beside me at those outside tables. 

Or even filling the six-person dining table, or four bar stools inside.

From inside my cramped little house.

Interesting enough, the hype for nature has returned. It is now not just because of randomized Pinterest feeds for natural scenery. And it’s not because of my childhood memories, it’s with the help of my newfound lake. Now I’ve been to lakes before; my grandma enjoys the vehemence in putting up the option for my family to take a walk around the lake in this regional park not far from her house. But this lake is new. Completely unexpected. It’s on this very campus, my second home-away-from-home.

As I’ve walked in peace around the Sonoma State campus, I’ve started wondering if clouds are a similar representation of our social communications and interactions. Like I watch clouds combine and drift within the sky, my mind swirls in a similar drifting contemplation:

Will I even do it? Will I be able to drift around someone long enough to connect and gain an interacting relationship? Will I find new friends to combine with my current… Will I continue to be alone?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Hi, Mom. Hi, M.! Say Hi to Gram for me! Oh! And M., say hi to B., K., and P. for me.

We need to hang out. I wanna go on an adventure with my buddies. Y’all can just come over and we’ll figure out what we’re doing from here. 😃👀🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥹

(I try to spam all the heart emoji buttons whenever I talk with my friends and family. I want to emphasize the point that…)

I miss you guys…

Yeah, yeah I know… I’ll be seeing you all home soon.

I’m good. I’m doing good up here.

Classes are good. The workload’s been manageable. Housemates have been… here, and around. Still disregarding me like usual nowadays. *Sighing into the receiver.*

Life Update: Classes are good, we’re just going along. I joined a club!

I can now keep up a breezy conversation. I’m still almost forgetful of the classes and clubs.

But classes can often stick out for us.

Like I’d stuck myself out in trying to be inviting and friendly to one classmate. In trying to help them find something, our wandering one building on campus to eventually find a good location for lunch just let us have a minute to get closer to one another. We’re closer still when I finally took advantage of an opportunity that I never took with club meetings, but had to be more assertive about based on classroom settings: gaining contact information for the sake of reliability when it comes to the classwork or lectures.

And for the sake of long overdue interaction.

I took the time granted to me to relax away from the classmates and the club peers and figured that whether I see these people in the next meeting or not, the other stranger who calls my name with a friendly tone, will finally have me call their name back.

Four new people is a starting point.

Whenever we reach out to one another for a chance to have breakfast together, we’re now floating to one another and connecting.

Hopefully many gusts to connect with in a long-term.

For evolving my friend group.

Yeah. I’m doing a lot better.

I’m excited about these new acquaintances.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I walk into my room bouncily. Glancing past the inviting sunny yellow paint on my Dublin walls.

To a large window showcasing a cloudy skyline above me.

A bark cuts through the reunion.

I can finally focus – without the headphones, or the closed door – on distinguishing my family’s laughter while they sit together, chatting among themselves.

After spending two years away – with the exception of my regularly scheduled weekend visits, or extended breaks – my time with my separation anxiety at Sonoma is transformed from a head-hanging frown into a welcoming smile.

After counting these dancing clouds from my window, I take a relaxing break, falling into a peace on my cushy bed.

Looking over the figures that have surrounded my head.

The four stuffies I’d situated on my previous bed have revisited me.

Now being joined by six additional stuffies.

Ten stuffies. One for each of the ones who love me.

And have supported me toward my independent, personal growth.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I’d forgotten how short the hour-long drive can sometimes feel.

When you’re not dedicated to thinking about returning to the campus.

With two years’ independent living experience relatively under my belt, returning to this first officially recorded home-away-from-home ten years later felt indescribable.

My grandma had made an intriguing comment once, before I took my first steps onto this new path of my life: It’s different; not like the campus we’d once looked at way back when.

I couldn’t gauge what she meant by that the first time; I hadn’t ever recalled this campus before I became an official Seawolf.

But man, was she ever right about that.

Difference.

And yet. It still felt like the same journey.

While it takes me a minute to recollect my bearings for what’s what now on the 269 acre campus, I find my way onto one of the intertwining paths that I know will be taking me the right way.

Reminiscing over how quickly these pathways interconnected and led me toward new people. The people I scan before me become the same as the pathways my eyes follow throughout this courtyard we’re gathered in.

And yet, there were so many more people out in the new world I’ve set foot into.

So many more pathways than those that I’d initially found to guide me.

So much more potential out here for you, and me, to glide toward others.

We’re not returning to my dorm. Not just yet.

It’s no longer an optical illusion, paths I once thought of as ever-extending hallways.

Inching along the asphalt pathways in a tranquil bounce, I think of clouds dancing in the sky almost meshing together along a traced line like these pathways.

I think of all the places, of all the people, these walkways had once connected me to.

My head rises – and not just to view the sky, and I see what I saw back then.

College students: enjoying the day; enjoying the campus; enjoying the proximity.

It took longer than I used to calculate to get to my destination.

I’d stopped.

No music to blare. The only notes being from birds, and any assorted callouts from students.

Alright. We’ll talk with you later!…

Which I didn’t ignore this time.

Inhaling deeply, taking in as much wind as I can, I stretch myself out to this campus. Accepting as many cloudlet clusters as I can see.

With every slow blink, I recalled each time I had been able to express myself in peace with another new person around me on this very campus.

Letting all the other daunting experiences of my past displeasing interactions waft as far away, and even farther than, they’d stayed after leaving this campus the first time ten years ago.

In reference to a weak vantage point, my memories tug me back into looking at the surrounding buildings from a diagonal perspective. Each building I looked toward – even those which I never physically stepped inside myself during my own terms – had taken on a skewed vision.

Large, inviting buildings.

Easy to get lost in.

And yet nothing, if just bare minimum in some spaces, to keep you grounded enough.

Not a person in sight.

Intimidating,

The view I gave myself: emptiness.

Total lack of paraphernalia and amped up celebrations.

Somehow, out of all my unpleasant memories of this school, the almost-deserted event locations still stuck with me.

The view I got: the bustling campus I always knew this place would blossom into given certain times in the day.

I no longer sheltered myself.

I walk through the doors.

Anxiety hits me yet again like the fan’s cycling air I feel breeze across my face, wind that is somehow distinctively separating the outside from the inside. As the motion-sensored door slides again, a knot pulls my stomach. Over the roaring crowds, I don’t hear just how faint the Student Center door clicks, sealing me within the stuffy room. I know that click wasn’t followed by extra chatter just passing my ears. Easily accessible doors or not, I will myself to not slink outside. Back.

My metamorphosis needed to happen. Because I didn’t want to go back. Back outside. Back to meeting the backs or shoulders or side profiles of people like those housemates who I’d tried to meet with crippling success.

While my back faced all exits, my rigid shoulders fell with a relieved sigh.

It’s weird isn’t it? How you just might be able to see someone for the first time, and then that same person keeps popping up when you hadn’t expected it throughout the rest of your day after first disconnecting?

The clouds of the student body part and I see all of them together. Meandering up from the large, comforting lounge space comes a familiar group: five people – classmates I’d had the pleasure of spending extra time with together (yes, with the familiar squealing-to-my-mother after-effect because of my surprising chattering).

While the rest of them talk amongst themselves, I recognize and divert my attention to two of them immediately.

E. In the Fall semester of ‘23, I yapped a “hey” before I even thought about stopping myself. That “hey” turned into an offer for providing them with a snack I had on hand, which turned into an offer to take my free time to help them peruse the building for some other alternative sustenance before they had to leave for work. In offering the snack, I also killed two birds with one stone and offered them my phone number, so we’d have easier contact access whenever we needed help from the class we shared. Either that or just venting about the class we shared anyway.

As it turns out, when the one alternative they sought out was a bust for food, I offered to walk with them to a campus dining option.

With their work schedule, I provide my own friendly availability for their convenience. We’ve been meeting up by the roundabout fountain to walk together during our last eight months on the campus. Our destination, the “as per usual” pub.

Where we’ve continued to vent and gossip and just have lunch together.(Elliot.- “vending machine character”, w/ class + lunch dates, gossipping about our campus lives.)

A. I’m biting my cheek before I know he’s even started talking to me after I’d gotten settled into my life from Fall 2022.

Part of me doesn’t want me to turn my head. I don’t want to acknowledge him, to open my mouth.

I’m not interfering, I give him a minute of space. I figured he’d have been talking with someone else.

But there is no one else beside him through this circular seating arrangement.

I’m the only one.

Which leaves me to give out weak little nods and hums to him when he does look my way.

Some other club member calls out a name, to which he gives a slight nod.

But I’m too disassociated to understand that that was his name they just called.

So he remains nameless. But I’ve already seen his face, and committed to the proximity, however awkward it may become between us from this small bi-weekly club gathering.

That is, until I meet him – he meets me, during one of his shifts on campus.

My name coming out of his mouth from that nameless face.

At least my courage to exchange the “hey!” with him has arrived.

His name still hadn’t.

But, I make the effort. Thanks to the brief chit-chat I’d caught the week before, I took a guess at what I thought I’d heard his name to be.

Turns out, I got it right.

Turns out, we exchanged contacts then and there. To keep each other in the loop of our club, should either one of us need it. Not like we wouldn’t still walk over or sit near one another anyway.

And the numbers were a good way to reciprocate offers for breakfast, lunch, or even dinner meetings on any occasion that we’re free in.(Adam.- clubmate + lunch, dinner, breakfast hangouts)]

Of the ten housemates I’d encountered in two years, not one of these people had been in either of my living spaces.

Who knows if I’ll ever see any of the housemates again. My stomach ached thinking, surprisingly, about how often I remember mentally begging them to take their own separate routes in their lives so that there wouldn’t be awkward interference between us from in our living arrangements so many years ago. I also almost had the wind knocked out of me as I memorialized the times I’ve spent with my cloudlet of friends since officially returning home from the campus.

I reflexively smile, cramming the nerves down to my feet – that I’d just meant to walk backwards with.

“Hey, Veronica! Do you want to grab dinner?”

I didn’t have enough time with them during my two years here. But eventually I’ve had just as good of a contact streak with these sky bunnies through these last ten years as I’ve had with my cloudlet of friends.

Stretching a hand out; spreading a word as simple as “hey,” joining a club; sharing your experiences, or your interests, hobbies or art, with influential and participating helpers, or even fangirling with other like-minded quirky people. All the alluring sky bunnies from these events I put myself into.

All ways you as a cloud can expand to accumulate others and live a beneficial life.

No more harmful isolation.

I’m no longer excluding myself from interactive connection.

The Proximity Effect is working efficiently. The longer I stay near these new people, the better chance we have of maintaining our friendship.

It was nice to see them again.

We meshed together to help me finally use Pareidolia, help re-imagine my life into the same shape of a cloud heart.

Turns out. I did pretty well for myself.

For the first time in twenty-one years, I branched out. I have entered this different world.

My wings have spread and I am finally happy among the vast clouds.

I recreated a cloudlet.

One to join my four friends.

The room lit up, my peers glowing. Outside, the sun peeked through the clouds.

I walk forward. To meet my newest friends.