Dear Ann Arbor,
Six months from now, I rest my case with you.
I pride myself on ambition and relentless enterprise, all of which will ultimately be weighed against the quiet arbitrariness of a single decision rendered in half a year from here. Every stride I make toward you is calculated, every accolade painstakingly cultivated, and every fragment of my personhood delicately contorted into something I hope you might deem worthy of remembrance. I want—need—you to perceive me as I perceive you: as something almost celestial in its worth, something that is innately coveted, an indistinguishable amalgamation of devotion, gumption, and a little bit of luck.
Ann Arbor, I pray you will prove merciful to me.
It is a cruel perversity that I find myself inexorably drawn toward you with every constituent of my being, as though gravity itself has relinquished its claim upon the barren earth beneath my feet and instead consigned my soul to an impossible fantasia which tethers me to the opposite side of this state. You are what I have taught the tendrils of my deepest desires to crave, a malevolent romanticism which I worry will one day betray me. How I long for your greener grass, your gothic sprawl, and the sepia-lit sanctity of your divinity at dusk.
If it be requited, let me adore the mercilessness of your winters, the snowflake kisses against reddened cheeks, and their powder white remnants across the skeletal trees on State Street. Bring me two hours away from this familiarity to a place where the world lies in the palm of my prayerful hands, away from this green and white which has consecrated my longing for your azure and maize insignia.
I pray you make it worthwhile, the way you never seem to loosen your grip upon my mind.
Perhaps in a year, I’ll return to this column in insurmountable satisfaction. I’ll have watched the confetti descend in gilded flurries and signed my name and my future away to your prestige, the very dream I have been awaiting since the conception of the block M first etched itself into my tortured, hopeful consciousness. I will know then whether I was ever worthy of you—whether my name, at long last, found itself deserving of a place beneath your hallowed banners. I will know whether this trepidation I harbor at the mere thought of calling you mine is prophetic instinct or merely the self-inflicted cruelty of longing too deeply for something so perfect.
In the interim, before December arrives in fewer than 200 days, I am burdened with the exquisite agony of uncertainty. But what a privilege it is to hope for you. To yearn so voraciously, and to romanticize so recklessly. To feel so deeply in my assurance that somewhere between your ivy-cloaked stone and winter-bitten air exists the life I have already begun before it is even mine.
Until then, Ann Arbor.
