Back in Brooklyn, I unexpectedly ran into a friend from Middlebury on my block yesterday. It might not seem so strange; a lot of Middlebury students hail from the Big Apple as I do. This chance encounter caught me off guard though because I had just been thinking about how good it felt to be walking around in a city—the noise and smells, the sights and the pace—how different it was from Middlebury. How different the busyness of urban life was from that of life at school, how strange it felt to look at the people I passed and not recognize a single face in a neighborhood that otherwise felt so familiar.
As I turned the corner, I made eye contact with the next presumed stranger. Instead, I saw a face that I recognized. Sylvia and I chatted for a few minutes, I met her mother, and we walked away with tentative plans to meet up soon. It was so nice to have the familiarity of both of my “worlds”—Middlebury and New York—all in one moment.