A month into the semester. You’ve begun to settle in. You know the faces, the characters that color your classes. You’ve become comfortable. But then you see them. It’s subtle at first. A flash of red hair at Wurster. A winking blue eye on the glade. You think that maybe you are haunted, some Cathy of your past, rendering you a Heathcliff, destroying the peace you’ve had since summer.
But then, with a sort of horrific realization typically reserved for realizing you’ve drunk posted to your Instagram story, or perhaps slept through a final—you remember. They’re back.
The worst people you know, the ones who decided to go on study abroad in the fall, just to say they did it first. The people whose aggressively assertive voices—like GelX on a chalkboard—you haven’t had to hear since May; the passive aggressive fencing match in your colliding friend groups that you haven’t had to worry about—your enemies. They’ve returned.
It’s like God made them just to grind your gears—Eve’s apple, but it’s rotten, and you just want to chuck it at their head every time they drawl: “When I was abroad.” And all that remains to be seen is which of you can say hello at a higher pitch when you see one another on the glade this Spring. But then you remember. The even worse worst person you know has left for Florence/Madrid/Barcelona this semester. And all at once, paradise is regained.