This photo was taken at The Blue Benn, a hometown diner in Bennington, Vermont, just down the street from Bennington College. A diner I’d grown up going to, but for the sake of fitting in with all the freshman transplants, I would ooh and ahh at all the small-town touches, like the juke box and the elderly waitresses with frilly aprons, as if I’d never seen them before. I’d do the same thing at the local bookstore and the closest field of cows.
On this visit, though, I was long past the point of needing to pretend I didn’t know my way around this town. No, by the time this photo was taken, I’d already spun like a tornado through my freshman year before deciding the month before returning for my sophomore year that I had to get the hell out of there. I left Vermont for the gulf coast of Florida nearly overnight, before uprooting once more and landing in Austin, Texas a couple months later. There, I burned out completely and hit rock bottom. By the time all my friends were returning to campus for the spring semester, I’d been back home living on my mom’s couch for a few months, reeling in the aftermath of the past year.
It was a cool February morning, the day after the huge party I’d driven up to campus to attend, even though I was no longer a student. Once a Bennington kid, always a Bennington kid -- the security guys would wave anybody through, and the buildings are unlocked 24/7. To this day, I could probably live in the arts building for a week before anyone would even realize I don’t go to school there anymore. Easier still was having a group of girlfriends back on campus begging me to come back for one last hurrah, like old times.
My favorite thing about my Bennington friends is how they never asked me questions. I’m sure I’d explained it to them in Gchat messages over the last several months -- what had really driven me to leave campus, what I’d been doing since, why I was back in Vermont despite having run so far away from it. But if they harped on it, if they said anything at all, I don’t remember it. They merely welcomed me back with open arms and jello shots, and in a blink I was back in a packed dorm room slipping into drunken oblivion, while a girl I’d never met drew all over our faces in arms with swirling rainbows of paint.
For one night, I got to pretend I hadn’t literally flushed it all down the toilet. I got to dance limb to limb with girls who looked so genuinely elated to have me back, basking in the thick cigarette smoke pulsing through the living room, happy to be climbing in and out of the giant common room windows once again. We spent the night wandering back and forth from the dance floor to various dorm rooms in the old colonial house, just like at all the other parties. In one room, we sit on a kid named Ian’s bed and pass around a joint. In another, a pretty girl who reminds me of Allison from Hocus Pocus serves us a platter of shots. We smoke cigarettes out of the window of her room, and at the end of the night, I run down the commons lawn, arms outstretched, screaming for everything I could’ve had.
The next morning, faded swirls of purple and green down my arms, head pounding, I take two of my friends downtown to an abandoned building to shoot pictures for the film class I’d be in if I hadn’t dropped out. I follow them around to sunlit corners, considering for a moment digging my own camera out of the trunk, but remembering icily that I’ve nowhere to develop the photos. I’m not part of this world anymore, I’m merely a prop. They take me out to breakfast afterward to thank me for driving them around.
I didn’t move away from Vermont for another 5 months, but I never spoke to any of those girls again. I truly don’t remember if I dipped out and stopped answering their calls (as I am wont to do in friendships), or if they stopped reaching out altogether because they had lives to live and thesis to write and brilliant minds to strengthen (and I was just a girl cleaning toilets for a living now). Part of me wonders if I was too jealous, if seeing them lead the lives I wish I hadn’t given up was too much for me. As glad as I am that I got one more taste of that life, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my life pining after just one more hit.