A year later, passing on wisdom about the beauty of the future

"So, if I told you a year ago that you'd be here, driving away from Philly International Airport in Nina's Corsica, with me, Ediz and Jessica Jones, me going to Haverford, you at Princeton — what are the chances that you would have believed me?"

That was Tolga. A friend since third grade, Tolga and I have (more or less) grown up together. We played basketball during every lunch at Grand View Elementary School, looking up to the giant sixth graders with awe until that fateful day that we realized we were the sixth graders.

After school, I'd be on my skateboard and over at his house within seconds, usually to forsake a list of spelling words for the latest Nintendo game. Our lives were two eggs scrambled together in the same bowl, our friendship morphing with the ebb and flow of the youthful sea known as Growing Up.

"There is no way. I never even knew this car existed, much less that us four would be in it!"

That was me, smiling as I spoke, fiddling with the windshield wipers to clear the rain. I thought back to our days at Manhattan Beach Intermediate, a school that saw our friendship become strained, not because of any particular falling-out, but because teenagers just lose touch sometimes. He went for ska, and I went for punk rock; he did the whole student council thing, and I opted for journalism.

Still, though strained, the ties of our friendship were never completely severed. We played on the same club soccer team during junior high, laughing at the sounds our bodies could make in the back seat of whichever minivan happened to be delivering us to the field that day. We went to a few shows together, and even tried our hand at musical endeavors of our own. Our lives were no longer intertwined, but constructing a flow chart between us was still a very doable task.

"Isn't it weird? I never even knew either of you that well back at Costa, and I'm here staying with you and driving all over the place."

That was Jessica. She's a year younger than Tolga and I, and one of the "more advanced" students back at our alma mater, Mira Costa High School. She had chosen to spend her spring break back here on the East Coast, trying to make her mind up between Harvard and Princeton. She was right: No one in the car knew her that well. She was one of those girls that I always said "hello" to, but one that was just on a different path than me. Or so it seemed back then. If anything, Tolga and I knew her reputation, the one that told us she was super-smart, a girl that was bound to be a Supreme Court justice or the first female president of the United States.

The few days that I had spent with her were unique, giving me the opportunity to travel back in time to my first visit to Princeton. Her questions ran the normal gamut of things ("How is the food," "What are the people really like," "What is there to do for fun around here?"), but each one made me realize that I knew Princeton a lot better than I had ever wanted to admit. And it was fun answering each one, feeling like an Orange Key Tour guide, minus the anxious parental figures that always ask where McCosh is.

"Yeah. Very weird. I mean, this very moment. I could never have predicted it. Could you, dude?"

That was me again. A very bedazzled me. A year ago, I had been in Jessica's shoes, wondering where the acceptance letters would be coming from, which schools would deem me unworthy. I had been like every other one of the pre-frosh students who recently descended upon our school like springtime honey bees upon a honey pot. Wide-eyed and bushy tailed, I remember walking around this campus in wonderment, thinking of all the possibilities that Princeton would offer, imagining the East Coast version of my life to be a romantic potpourri of train rides, big cities and snow drifts. It all seemed very appealing at the time, which is why I guess I ended up here. But, it had never been my plan, never a goal of mine.

"Never. It's like we fell into our lives. Sort of like someone else is holding the plans, and we are all just following them."

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Tolga again, with a comment of great insight. It was true, that feeling of detachment. I felt it too, ever since I had arrived on this campus. Sure, it was me that was doing the studying, me that was eating at Frist, me that was driving Nina's Corsica to pick up our friend Ediz from the airport. But how did I get there? What made this life, the one that I was living (the one that I am living), the one that was right? Why wasn't I playing in some rock and roll band somewhere, or maybe sitting back at Tolga's house playing more video games and working some dead-end job?

I couldn't completely piece together how the events of my life had lead me to that stretch of Interstate 95, every little choice somehow working to put me there.

After all, just two years earlier I didn't even think college was for me. I saw myself traveling for a while, getting to know the world, perhaps fleshing out a novel or two before settling down to start a band. Princeton was a word on an atlas, a place of wealth and prowess that I didn't belong to. It was a place that I thought would stay a make-believe image of antique architecture forever, not a place that I'd be settling down in.

"What are you guys talking about? We planned this a few weeks ago. You knew I was gonna be here. None of this should be a surprise."

That was Ediz, the 17-year-old little brother of a mutual friend. He was out visiting the East for spring break too. Tolga had asked me about coming down to pick Ediz up a few weeks in advance, and I told him that I'd love to. I loved going down to Philly, or perhaps it was that I loved getting out of Princeton. Whatever the fact, Ediz was right: I had known for quite some time that I would be down there picking him up.

"I know, Ediz, but haven't you ever thought about the way our lives are gonna turn out? I mean, I think right now that in a year I'll be going to school at Princeton and getting one year closer to graduating, but who knows? Maybe I'll win the lottery before then, or join the circus. You never know."

My last comment for the night was a doozy. It got right down to the crux of the matter: We are all living our lives blind to the future. Sure it is easy to hope and dream and postulate about our futures, but the simple fact is that we never know what is waiting for us. Not until I was in Jessica's shoes, traversing Princeton's stunning campus with an upperclass tour guide, did I really picture myself attending college here. And, even then, I was imaging things to be very different than how they are.

Before all the glitz of my first visit here, Princeton was but a made-up place. Nina, a friend made through musical tastes, never existed. Nor did her Corsica. I didn't have to drive down to Philadelphia to see Tolga because he and I were still neighbors, and I was still riding my skateboard over to his house to play video games. Before that, I was still in middle school typing out stories for the newspaper. Earlier yet, I was just a sixth grader, wondering what lay beyond the blacktop in junior high.

Back then — just as it is now — the future was still a mystery. Princeton was light years away and that drive down to the airport wasn't even a thought. But, in many ways, that is the beauty of the future; it is as beautiful or ugly as you imagine it.

"When you finally get to the future, Ediz, it's never quite how you pictured it. Sometimes, like now, it's things that you never even knew existed."

Alfred Brown '05 is from Manhattan Beach, Calif. He can be reached at aebtwo@princeton.edu.