In French you don’t say “I miss you” but rather tu me manques— “you are missing from me”— which I think is wonderfully poetic. Being in France away from home, it strikes me how accurate that phrasing is. Despite my love of being here there are moments when I feel an acute sense that home and loved ones are missing from me, as if a hollow space has been carved out from my chest.

Sometimes when my mind drifts to Chapel Hill that deep missing hits. A missing made worse when I acknowledge that I’m no longer a recent grad because my ONYEN account expired a couple weeks ago, and it’s been 6 months since I graduated, and my student loans come due next month. And so I wanted to write a little love letter to Chapel Hill, to help me say goodbye to the self-built home where I grew into myself and opened my mind to new ideas and my heart to friends who are like sisters.  

When I think of Chapel Hill I think of getting Insomnia cookies delivered at midnight and lingering over loaded sweet potato tots in Linda’s cozy down bar and sharing queso dip at Cosmic Cantina at 2 a.m. I think of late night impromptu kitchen talks with my roommates and movie nights and study sessions. I think of the warm little bubbles of our dorms when we got ready to go out: tables— vibrating with music from the speaker— covered in shimmery eyeshadow dust and lipsticks and sticky shot glasses and cheap mixers. I think of crowded parties Freshman year and karaoke at Goodfellow’s Senior year. I think of music reverberating through the Dean Dome and Franklin Street after beating Duke. I think of finding books in the peaceful stacks of Park Library where I worked, discussing branding in the tech savvy classrooms of the Journalism school, and debating imagery on creaky old desks in Greenlaw.

I spent a couple summers in Chapel Hill, when campus was quiet and the town was sleepy under a humid blanket of heat— that thick Southern heat that demands a drink in your hand at all times: cold milk tea from Cha House downtown, fizzy Truly’s with a sunscreen aftertaste at the pool, iced coffee from the bootleg Starbucks in the Student Store. And then mid-August arrived and the town would swell with an influx of sun-kissed students moving back. Nights were warm, humming with music, slick with beer and vodka and sweaty skin made bare by cropped tops and dancing hands.

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And then October would come and it was my favorite month because North Carolina has a smoky cinnamon crispness in the fall. The gold-drenched trees, bright blue skies, pumpkin patches and football tailgates and s’mores and Halloween. But by November everything was too cold and stressful: late nights at the library and early mornings in the student union, slow climbing of steps to class, desks chaotic with essays and tests and notes.

Returning to campus in January after the holidays was always more somber than August. Winter, mild as it was, would last a little too long, broken only by those rare, delightful snow days that came just when we needed them most: procrastinating with Netflix and dressing up for snowy photoshoots and sipping hot chocolate and marveling at a world made new.

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And then spring would bring bright green baby leaves and flowering dogwoods and tulips at the Old Well and campus would come alive, the grass taken over by students stretched out under the sun. The quad on a beautiful day was a murmur of hundreds of students lounging and playing music and wobbling on slacklines and calling after dogs and chatting over lunches. On those days I would stop for a moment and wonder how to hold on to a moment forever.

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On my last walk through campus before I left for home and then France, it was weird to think I wouldn’t be back in a couple weeks taking classes. I knew campus so intimately. All the shortcuts, where to park depending on the time of day, best places to eat and study and hide. I wondered what would change. Even with all my friends gone, sitting on Wilson steps alone on a Sunday, I could still feel the heart of the place. I felt enveloped in it, like a safe, warm, loving embrace. Sitting there I saw the occasional summer student headed to the gym or class. It made me nostalgic. Already I missed waking up and walking to the library with a heavy backpack, buying a hot coffee and muffin and staking out a window desk at library. I missed getting ready for a football game on a Saturday morning, and getting a chicken gryo from Med Deli in between classes, and walking past the pit on a warm day with all the singing and shouting and flyers. I missed sitting in a class of smart people and analyzing books and talking about philosophy and the meaning of life and how sometimes in these class discussions my whole perspective on the world would peel open.

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I know I’m favoring the good parts and forgetting the bad— how I was always so busy and stressed, how sometimes my friends frustrated me or the administration annoyed me, how sometimes I felt uncertain of the future. But isn’t that nostalgia? The art of glossing over?

Well, romanticized or not, here is my little love letter to Chapel Hill, written thousands of miles away, looking out over Lyon at dusk with all its red roofs, wishing well a place that, on occasion, I feel is very much missing from me.