That small town is home to Western Carolina University, where I spent five of the most important years of my life. I attended WCU from August 1995 through May of 1998, or three academic years. Then I dropped out of college for a year, before returning in August of 1999 and earning my degree in May of 2000.
In August of 2007, I came back to WCU as a student in the Master of Arts History program. After assessing the job market for people with history degrees, however, I decided to leave after a year and enroll in law school. That appears to have been a wise decision, though I had a blast in Cullowhee.
Western Carolina University and the surrounding towns- Cullowhee, Sylva and Dillsboro have a wonderful, magical place in my mind. My undergraduate years at WCU were the most important in forming who I am as an adult. A decade after that, the lone year in graduate school is still the happiest year I have had in my life so far.
Even now as I type these words, though, I do not want to write about my experiences at Western. The memories are too intense, and I think that frankly I have suppressed most of them just so that I can focus on getting through my days in the present.
I would not do the memories or the magic justice, sitting here at a desk in Florida. If I ever get the chance to spend a significant amount of time in Cullowhee again, then I am sure the old emotions will come flooding back and I will want to record them.
But for now the memories are just too happy, too sad... too "raw" for me to put myself through such an exercise. I said August 2007 through the summer 2008 was the happiest span of my life. I lived life like I wish I had done as an undergraduate. So I do not want to try and revisit that extreme high. It would be too painful to come back down.
In turn, September 1997 through the spring 1998 in Cullowhee was the most painful year of my life. I grew my hair out, got an ear ring and tried to grow a beard. One of my best friends from WCU refers to it as the year that I decided to be a pirate. It was the year before I dropped out. I remember going to a hockey game in Fayetteville over the Christmas break in 1997 with my dad, brother, and my uncle. I overheard my uncle comment to dad about me, "He looks wiped out."
That was the year I lost faith in a god that loved us, and I truly began to understand what loneliness meant. I do not care to revisit my discovery of those dark places, either.
So there is a gap in this blog about my experiences- a very significant gap. The first blog I ever wrote was for the Graduate Student Association at WCU, when I was there in 2007 and 2008. That captures some of what the happiest year was like for me, but only a small portion.
I could spend an eternity exploring that time. The smell of the buildings at Western, the way the trees and plants looked in different seasons of the year, the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter there, the extreme beauty of how young we all were then, how I changed in that place, and so much more. And so much more. But there is no going back, unless a heaven exists. It makes my chest feel like it is going to explode as I type this draft on a Saturday evening.
I have to stop. There will just be a gap. It was a total of five years of my life. Five years now, in the present, will pass by very quickly, I believe, without nearly the significance. Those five years at Western, though, were the most important and most treasured years of my life. It is too hard to write about them.
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