I really dislike Eugene. Personally I think the only thing it has going for it is the slickly-designed yellow “O” with the silver wings coming out the side. The epitome of sexy college boys, testosterone and football cleats. Go Ducks. What would we be without it? Even the geeks sport the flashy “O” adorned green and yellow gear, wearing it with pride, in between an intellectual drunken conversation over some trend-tastic locally-brewed beer. Sigh. I can’t use the word “hate,” because it wouldn’t be fair. In general, I loathe it. It’s so gray. It’s grayer than Portland. I don’t like it here because I don’t want to be here. I want a career that’s enjoyable and challenging and that’s why I’m here- for the education. But I resent it. It’s a young person’s endeavor, and here I am, feeling old and jaded, uninterested in house parties and irritated by drunken antics. I’m the one that pounds on doors wearing slippers at 3 am because these f’in kids simply won’t shut the f*** up.
The older I get the more I despise the institution of education and its restrictions “Create the value of your education through papers and letter grades, prove to us what you’ve learned. Walk in our ugly brick buildings and eat at our fried-batter smelling campus bar ‘Rennies,’ that we fail to see for what it actually is, which is a place- that if not assigned nostalgia and fond memories of college-age ‘rage’ and sexual tension- would be a place with too little seating, unhappy bartenders and a centimeter of grease coated on top of all of its surfaces,” I imagine the powers to be unconsciously saying. So. There’s That.
Then there’s my favorite people. When I met them it was 1 am and I went outside to smoke. I couldn’t find my lighter and they lit my menthol.
I had this faraway memory in my head about Rita Gelman’s book “Tale of a Female Nomad,” where she finds her heart’s contentment in loving strangers and squashing the proverbial barriers between Americans and other countries’ people.
The three of them were an oasis for my weary spirit. I was just a bad grade away from having an excuse to run away from this pipe dream. I ached to know them. Their courage astounded me. Their language baffled me, and I longed to be as brave as them.
“Ash-lay!” They greet me as I walk into their house. The scene is per usual. Aziz on the couch with a mischievous look. Khaled standing there in his blue Abercrombie sweats, ironic in its symbol of Californian dreamin’ against his dark Kuwaiti skin. Fahad and Tariq sit in the middle of the room in front of the 50 inch Vizio TV playing FIFA on the PlayStation. Little cgi men run up and down the soccer field as the two Saudis give each other grief in broken English and Arabic, moving their bodies with the console’s controllers. I sit down and watch them play. A whistle from the teapot signals the tea water is percolated.
“We found this special milk, like what we have at home,” Khaled said as he prepared tea for all. He’s only 18 years old but he has the heart of a grown up. He’s a big brother and he often shows me the video of his little 2-year-old little sister Aliyah biting his cheek when he unsuspectingly offered it for a kiss. Neither of us tire of the video. You would be a bad person if you could tire of such innocent, absolutely endearing rebellion. A curly-headed chubby- cheeked live doll, biting her big brother’s cheek. That’s the essence of human love right there.
Khaled pulls out the evaporated milk from the fridge and pours it into the Arabic tea he brewed. “Estakana” is what they call it in Kuwait he says. All the boys drink the tea, and pass Pepperidge Farms assorted cookies. Ironic and charming I think, as they have no idea that in American culture men would never openly partake in tea and cookies with one another. No matter how many locally brewed beers they had consumed. Khaled makes everyone’s tea. It’s the big brother in him I think, always putting others’ needs before his own.
Eugene brings me these guys. They make it feel like home when I am homesick. They give me hope when I am lonely. As they sit and FaceTime or Skype their families in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it puts things in perspective for me. They’re so brave. They’re so far away from home. I get uncomfortable because my loved ones are two hours away by car. And it makes me feel ridiculous.
Then there’s a time every evening after tea and FIFA, a few laughs an Arabic lesson, that I return home, one flight of stairs above them. I draw strength from their spirits, and rest easier than other nights.
Each day I wake up and the sky is gray. The gnarled fallen branches and debris from the aftermath of the snow and ice storm that hit Oregon twice in a few months seem to wave like evil fingers at me. The cloudy skies weigh heavily on my spirit. Their chronic presence makes anxiety rise in my chest and caps my cheerfulness to a fleeting thought, a wishful thought. Sometimes the sun tries to peek through the clouds and momentarily, hesitantly, I feel joy. Then a dense cloud floats in front of it like a cruel joke. I don’t even lift my head anymore. I have to look within for joy — using my imagination and my relationships with other people.
Khaled and Aziz, Fahad and Tariq are my home away from home. They are nothing like anyone I know, and it comforts me. Their kindness to me, their brotherly antics with one another, and their ability to be brave and live here so many thousands of miles from their comfort zone, gives me a feeling of security and a sense of home that is as strong as my real home. They are not my family but act as such anyway, and I find them beautiful and rare. I find them precious and endearing. I draw strength from them.
Without Eugene, I wouldn’t have met these precious people. I see my future in them. When I’m with them I see Khaled, a young boy learning English, making tea, missing his little sister. I see a 24 year-old man with a broken heart here to learn English and get his Master’s degree, but missing the one who married someone else. Doubting himself, but studying hard anyway. I see Tariq, half Hispanic and half Saudi, loving his life here, free of judgment so he can smoke pot and drink cervecas without the girls not wanting to date him. Without his family disapproving.
Fahad thinks about going home sometimes, since the girl he loves wants to divorce her husband and be with him. “But I’m confused Ashlay,” he says one night as we sit sipping tea. “But I try to love others. And I can’t.”
The reason my time in Eugene has been worth all the gray days, chronic anxiety, and snowy isolation is because I learned how to go inside myself and search for the piece of me that could find the piece of this place I could love. These friends, these brave guys, these brothers.
My education here began when I read Rita Gelman’s book and dreamed of loving all kinds of humans and finding what makes us all innately the same in people that aren’t like me physically or culturally. It ended when I learned what I needed to. That I’m never alone. That my physical place cannot control my sanity unless I let it. That there’s a beautiful human spirit inside every unfamiliar face. That even this gray, half-witted cloud-capped city can be golden and glowing with humans.
Eugene is perfect for me. I couldn’t have learned any of this without the discomfort of this god-forsaken bore of a place.
I watch the boys fade in the rearview mirror on a sunny Saturday in March, marking the beginning of spring break. They have helped me pack and load the truck, and I’m finally leaving the place I hate. But I leave them here, and they will never understand how much they have comforted me, how much they have taught me. With their loves and their fears, their families and their Abercrombie sweats, their kindness and their large brown eyes. Eugene is the only place I could have studied them so. It’s the only place that could have brought us together, it’s the only place that forced me to look farther than the skyline for joy.
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