Morning Train to New Haven

The Amtrak didn’t have a smell. I wanted a smell. Give me some sort of charm…something to think about. But it wasn’t there. A white noise to the nose. My brain mocked me for my attempted escape. This was reality. Not my reality, but a reality I was stepping into nevertheless. A reality where I didn’t belong.

I took my seat, threw on my headphones, and tried to blare away all of my fear.

“You might be a big fish in a little pond, doesn’t mean you’ve won…because there will always become a bigger one.”

Coldplay hummed into my ear, unmistakable and pointed. It was a message. It was a message to me. I wouldn’t listen. I ripped off my headphones and stared out of the window.

Trees blurred into water into tunnels into ocean. The destination was New Haven. The destination was Yale. The destination was anywhere but Harvard.

A day earlier I had sat in an uncomfortable pew in a Harvard lecture hall and listened to students eloquently state their credentials and Harvard experience. It was designed to “sell” Harvard to prospective students. But as I looked around at high school students with their parents seated in clothes that looked straight out of a Martha’s Vineyard closet, Harvard could have only sold me a paper bag.