“Place We Were Made”

“You smoke to choke the feeling

'Til the walls don't need the ceiling

All we talk about is leaving

All that I know is

No matter how far away

This is the place we were made

I know every streetlight

And maybe the colors will fade

This is the place we were made

—Maisie Peters, “Place We Were Made”

 

4-1-2020. No joke, when I moved out here in August 2018, my family went to this overlook, and my dad said, "I can see how you'd fall in love with this. Easy." And he was right. This is the place part of me was made. And I'll never forget it.

Actual footage of you guys coming into my life and making it a million times
more entertaining.

I’ve been very proud of how planned out this blog has been, but once I added “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” to the last post, it unleashed something in me. I’ve redone this entire last week of posts, even adding two more songs on a whim. I’m a sentimental maniac. A feels monster. Our time together is winding down, and I’m finding more and more words to express how I feel.

For those of you who don’t know, Maisie Peters is this folksy, pop-ish, sometimes country-ish artist, and her voice kind of sounds like summertime and youth and melancholy honey. I’m very into her stuff right now. Her tone alone is like a whole mood. And this song in particular just resonates so strongly with what I wanted to do with this blog. It’s like “Castle on the Hill”’s sister, but instead of the English countryside—which isn’t totally relatable, however picturesque it is—“Place We Were Made” sets itself in a small country town. “Put on our boots, carry our heels / Stumbling home over a field”—it could practically be Manhattan. (Okay, to be fair, any reference to boots and fields will make me think of Kansas.) In the next verse, it’s lines like, “Talking 'bout boys, now we call ex” and “Freezing cold and we don't even know” that remind me of us, all those Tinder boys we’ve swiped through, and that ridiculous winter of 2018. (But I think we knew we were really cold that year.) Still, there’s something about Peters’ song that feels like Manhattan. It’s the tone. The nostalgia.

4-7-2020. Simon vs. is forever "Dustin's book" in my head.
I know how much it means to you, and, because of that,
it means something to me, too. 

I can still remember seeing the Flint Hills for the first time, crossing over the bridge and seeing the sign that says, “Welcome to Manhattan.” I was driving, and I looked over to my mom in the passenger seat and said, “So this is it.” “It” meant so much and so little to me on August 3, 2018. I knew “it” was the place I would get my Master’s degree. “It” was the place I’d call home for a few years. “It” was the place I was going to take a Harry Potter class. I didn’t know that “it” was where I would go to my first bar, where I would move apartments without any help from my parents, have to make my own (very, very minor) car repairs, learn how to drive on ice, and meet people who would change how I think—about school, teaching, books, and myself—forever.

I guess as soon as we got here, though, we were thinking about leaving. Not like high schoolers do when they’re desperate to escape their hometown, but like people who know this isn’t the end of the journey. This is just a pit stop for us, and I knew two years would go by fast, but it seems like only yesterday I had my first mac n cheese grilled cheese at the Varsity food truck. I didn’t want to think about leaving. I still don’t, honestly, but, deep down, I always knew that there was more out there for us. I mean, have you met us? And I think that’s what gets me the most about this song, that knowledge that some places are temporary, that someday the colors will fade and that you might not remember every streetlight anymore—but you get to keep the feeling of it. I sometimes wonder if ignorance really is bliss or if knowing something won’t last makes you appreciate all the more while you have it. (Weirdly enough, that’s kind of how I feel about mortality and immortality. Like, do I love life so much because I know that I only have maybe 80 years of it? Is 80 years of feeling better than an infinite amount of lackluster complacency? [Sorry, I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy lately.]) But, in this, case, I think having a countdown helped me. It kept me grounded. It let me push the frustrations aside because I wanted every second to be as good as it could be. I didn’t—still don’t—want to hold on to the pain.

12-13-2019. A post Holiday Party drink at Auntie Mae's to show off our outfits. If a picture is worth 1000 words, this one says about 6000 completely unrelated things. How do you feel about graduation? Tag yourself: I'm V.

I said way back in the second post that Manhattan will always be a home to me. This city and the things I’ve experienced here have shaped me in so many ways, and I dread the day that I’ll leave and slowly forget the way our laughs sounded as the they echoed down the hall or the exact shade of gray the bullpen carpet is or which direction to turn to get to the mailroom The things that are muscle memory now won’t always be, and that makes me a little sad, but it also makes me want to hold on even tighter for these last few precious days.

11-2-2019. I hope Nick leaves us all a fraction of his fabulousness.

I also said way back in that second post that people have always been more home to me than places, so when Maisie Peters says, “This is the place we were made,” I can’t help but think that K-State is the place our cohort was made, the place our friendship started. There’d be no us without Manhattan. (Or, I don’t know, maybe this is a fantasy novel, and we’ve lived a hundred other lives together in different places, some long before Manhattan existed. Maybe we were pirates. That would be cool. Or Lords and Ladies in a Royal court. We were definitely witches at one point.)

We’re all going to take something different away from our time here, but we’re leaving pieces of ourselves here, too. K-State is a part of us now, and we’re a part of it, and no matter how far away we go, we can’t change that. Which is kind of nice, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to change it, anyway.

Love ∞,

Me