Ciara Alfaro ’19 writes about the nostalgia she’s felt upon returning to Colgate as an O’Connor Fellow.
I first met Hamilton when I was 18. It was August, and the last breaths of summer were in the air, panting out of my and my parents’ mouths as we climbed the three floors to Andrews 307. The room was unairconditioned — a condition I had never heard of — already partially filled with furniture from the University and one of my roommates. Andrews 307 was the only girls’ room on our side of the hallway. This meant that we would ask the boys across the hall for help transporting spiders from our windowsills; that one of us would get ghosted by one of the boys; and that we would all fall in love with our gorgeous community leader, whose door was next to ours, spilling stand-up laugh tracks out of his laptop late into the night.
We would not be smitten with him for long. Like the spiders, our attention would quickly be swatted in new directions. We were three girls, tasked with settling in this place we would learn to call home.
Before Colgate, my parents and I were in New York. It was my first time in the city. It was my parents’, too, but I did not pay attention to that. Instead, I walked 10 steps ahead of them the entirety of Manhattan. I did this because I didn’t want to be a girl in New York with her parents — I just wanted to be a girl in New York. And because they were moving slow in a place where people walk with purpose, ready to slam their toes on your heels if you paused for even a moment. I did not want to be seen taking photographs with my small iPhone, being 18, being nervous about what came next. To their credit, my parents did not pay much attention to my attitude. When I asked them to stop calling me by my childhood nickname, they smirked at each other. OK, Mouse Burger. I mean, Ciara! they added with faux gravitas. I rolled my eyes.
I was trying to signify that change was happening, and I would now be a grown-up who had no use for cheesy nicknames. (Has anyone ever been so young?) I rolled my eyes as they worked to settle me in for school — the rental car, the long, winding drive, the line of cars honking a parade up the hill.
After three days, it was time for them to go. We hugged and parted ways on the academic quad. There, I noticed the green undertone of my dad’s beard. I saw the soft round of my mom’s shoulders beneath her blond hair. They were the only faces I cared about at that moment. My mom cried and I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from copying her. We hugged several more times before they disappeared into the crowd of other parents, parading back out into the real world.
After they left, I felt alone for the first time. To be a girl in New York felt scarier than I was expecting it to. I wondered, How will I possibly make it until Thanksgiving without seeing my parents? I bought a planner to count the days. I did not yet know the way time gains velocity with age; how it runs faster as you gain less of it.
I did not yet know the way time gains velocity with age; how it runs faster as you gain less of it.
I am back in Hamilton now, this time to teach. I’m on a one-year fellowship, meaning that, at the end of this semester, I will be somewhere new again. I feel more certain here than I used to. I find whimsy here: inside the buoyant crystalline snow, inside those Lathrop window views, inside the Stars Hollow gazebo. Hamilton is made of small moments that will pass you by if you don’t catch them.
When I tell my students that I used to be a student here, their eyes light up, and I truly love it. On the days I wake with less balance, to be here feels disorienting. It is as if time has hiccuped. I turned 28 in March. It’s a number that feels so big and jarring, I recalculate the years in my head. There is no way I am this age — there is no way my 10-year high school reunion is here, there is no way I have been out of Colgate for nearly six years. This is that cliché people always say: Where did the time go? I have been warned about this for so long, and still, I feel as if I have been tricked. (Again, has anyone ever been so young?)
Several times a week, I climb the hill, slowly and breathlessly. In class, we talk story. We notice what sits inside of us each day, pulling at our attention. My students remind me how many pathways there are to curiosity. We stoke our questions. We learn to befriend time when we are happy and when we are lonely.
Sometimes, there are patterns to the stories my students tell. How will their lives at home continue without them? What does it mean for them to have finally gone away, only to miss what they left behind? What happens when the alchemy of a particular time and place is over?
I let my students spend as much time with these questions as they need. Being homesick is nothing I can solve or teach anyone away from. These are the questions that make up a life — at least for me, because I am a nostalgic person. I always miss the place I just was, no matter how hard I try against it. I like the fact of missing somewhere, oftentimes more than being there. It’s one of the truest instincts about me.
Which means, of course, that I am now nostalgic about when I was a student here. Because even when I was homesick, I found home in the ritual of kidney beans and cornbread at the women’s studies lounge, in ordering Oliveri’s while practicing Italian on the quad with my friends, and stargazing on the Field of Dreams. I found home in belly laughing with my library coworkers over Ricki’s subway stories. I found home in every dorm room I made my own, with Audrey Hepburn snapshots and tarot cards taped on the walls. I found home in couches, in movie nights, in professors I trusted, and friends whom I never could have met anywhere else.
What happens when the alchemy of a particular time and place is over?
Stories are the stop signs of life, an adviser once told me. How many stop signs there can be — in the questions that pattern, in the tiny moments that build a home, in the way I used to count time away and now I practice holding its weight in my hand, feeling it grow more precious and grooved with each day.
The story that changed New York for me happened one college summer. I was riding the subway alone, watching a mid-20-year-old laugh with her parents. They were clearly tourists — bubbling with enthusiasm, surveying travelers for where they should go next, enamored with experiencing this city together.
Suddenly, I wished to be this girl in New York: the girl who was not concerned with appearing independent, or rushing to the next moment, or being too cool for her parents. I realized then what I could not see when I was younger, which was that everything I was feeling when I moved
to Colgate, my parents were feeling, too.
And that, perhaps like that girl on the subway, the coolest thing I could do was try to be happy.
Now, when I call home from adulthood Hamilton, my parents answer, What’s up, Mouse Burger? They tell me what the contours of their lives look like without me — the retail drama, the Jack Russell befriending the backyard frog, the number of tumbleweeds piled by the dumpster. I tell them my own updates — the movies I am watching, the celebrity gossip I’m consuming, the chicken verde recipe I am simmering. There are so many ways to say I miss you.
There are so many ways to say home.
Ciara Alfaro is a Chicana writer from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, swamp pink, Passages North, Southeast Review, Witness, and more. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and her BA from Colgate University, where she is the 2024–25 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow.