Jessai Flores

Old Campus smells like cigarette smoke and memories dipped in candle wax, like stale beer clinging to cobblestone and the warmth of someone’s hoodie thrown over your shoulders at 2 a.m. It smells like crushed leaves and new books and the perfume your suitemate used to wear, trailing her like a second shadow, the one you’d catch a whiff of walking into the suite, engulfing you each time.

You hosted your 19th birthday in a friend’s dorm on the fourth floor of Lawrence Hall. The cake was too sweet, the candles melted into the icing and the room was too full but just full enough. You looked around — faces warm with laughter, crammed into the common room, leaning against door frames, lying on Twin XL beds, dancing between silver streamers and taped-up string lights and newspaper stars — and you thought, maybe this is it. Maybe this is what joy feels like: slightly sweaty and barefoot in a dorm room with people you met six months ago who somehow already knew the shape of your laugh.

You’d wander Old Campus at night, tipsy on cheap wine and giggles, wandering paths that led both everywhere and nowhere. You met people in the shadows of Durfee, people you hadn’t seen since Camp Yale, and you hugged like long-lost siblings. Club initiations happened here, too, in the early days of fall: paper bags over heads, paper crowns, paper-thin bravado. High heels sinking into damp grass. Someone’s hand steadying yours as you laugh too hard to even stand straight, gripping arms in a line of absurd solidarity, drops of liquor dripping down your chin. You re-enacted battle scenes from Endgame and clambered up the statue of Abraham Pierson: dramatic, ridiculous, victorious. You swapped stories outside L-Dub, swapped secrets in the glow of street lamps, swapped numbers you might never text but needed to have anyway. You watched societies gather, secret rituals unfolding like theater on the first Thursday of the year.

You walked those paths drunk, happy, exhausted, glitter still on your cheeks from God-knows-what. You walked them sober, silent, phone pressed to your ear, calling home for the first time from the bench outside Bingham, your mom’s voice crackling with static and comfort.

You drank hot cider at Fall Fest as the air turned sharp and golden, and when spring came, you would end the year the way it began: on Old Campus, drunk at Spring Fling, screaming lyrics into the night. Here, in the mud and snow, you ran through the rain until your jeans were soaked up to the knees. You let yourself lie on picnic blankets as the last of summer waned. Let champagne wash over you in bursts of celebration. 

You stumbled out of GHeav with mozzarella sticks and dreams, wandered home from the YDN building, frozen fingers clutching a camera. You cried in front of Linsly-Chittenden Hall — once because you failed a quiz, twice because you thought the world hated you as the cold pricked your skin and the wind slapped your cheeks raw. You once slipped on ice just outside of the High Street gates and bled a little. Red streaks on white snow. The scar is still there, faint on the back of your hand, a quiet reminder that even here, you fell and got back up.

You took photos of orange leaves drifting down and thought, “God, even the trees at Yale perform.” You handed out hot chocolate during the first-year snowball fight, camera slung across your chest, cup after cup passed to people you barely knew but already loved. You danced barefoot in Vanderbilt until 2 a.m., met a boy on skis once at 3 a.m., and never thought to ask why. There were pre-games in L-Dub and post-games in Welch, and debates whispered furiously underneath blankets and between mouthfuls of popcorn and pretzels. You even watched Ben Shapiro on someone’s laptop in Durfee and whispered commentary to the person next to you, both of you too tired to care, too intrigued to look away.

You stood in the middle of Old Campus once, confessed your dreams like the prayers nobody taught you how to say. You saw your friends in Farnam drape Christmas lights out their windows, spelling out JE LUX in neon green. You watched the sunset from the third floor of Phelps Hall, the sky turning to fire behind Harkness Tower, and thought — how can anything this beautiful ever last?

You even memorized the time it took to walk from the fifth floor of Bingham to the second floor of L-Dub — four minutes, if you managed to cross Old Campus uninterrupted. You learned to send your friend the “I’m here” text one minute before arriving so you wouldn’t have to linger at their entryway, waiting in the cold. These tiny rituals — they made a home out of something so temporary.

And living in Bingham tower was like being Rapunzel, high above the chatter — in a room so small you could touch both walls with your arms outstretched, fingertips brushing chips of paint. But you filled it anyway and made it yours — newspaper clippings, posters, someone’s law school degree, and a handkerchief from a regatta tucked behind the mirror, smelling faintly of salt and sun.

And when the courtyard below emptied into silence, you slipped out of Old Campus like a secret, past midnight, with the lamps flickering and the gates yawning open. You walked fast and quiet through the streets. Your breath rose in soft clouds in the cold air, your coat clutched close, heart pounding — not out of fear, but out of possibility. 

Every inch of Old Campus has held you. It has held your hangovers and your heartbreaks with cupped hands, your half-written essays and your full-hearted friendships. It has carried your voice, echoing laughter and late-night confessions caught between the bricks, the moss and the stones. It holds every version of you: drunk and delirious, lost and found, laughing and crying and standing still in the middle of it all, feeling the chill seep into your bones.

And now, you walk those same paths again, the ones that go everywhere and nowhere, and think — maybe this is still it. Maybe this always was it. This is the closest your class will ever live together again. Will ever be together again — at least until you return for commencement. 

Before everyone scatters to their own residential colleges, and after that, to lives that stretch further and further apart. But for now, for this brief moment in time, you are here. Together. And that is enough.