The first time I got off at the Clybourn Metra stop was with a stranger. The senior from Laptop ER who fixed my computer during New Student Week had cryptically texted me a few days later, “Do you like adventures?” The adventure turned out to be a trip so thick with talking it led us from the Hinman lawn to the Davis Metra stop.

“Do you want to come back to Chicago?” he asked. He lived in an apartment in Wicker Park. It was one of the first days of school, but I didn’t have many friends, and I hadn’t been into the city.

Stepping off the train, where the view of the Chicago skyline was in its purest form, I suddenly felt small. Seeing my response, he lifted his elbow into the air and stuck his armpit out at me.

“This is my wing,” he said. “You’re under it.”

Here was someone I barely knew taking me home to a place I had never been. I suppose this wouldn’t faze a naturally outgoing person, but I was not one of those people. I considered myself awkward, bookish, sheltered and somewhat solitary; my friends still make fun of me for lacking the ability to talk to strangers, even salespeople. But in that moment I was completely at ease. It was one of the first times I was fascinated by the fact that I had no idea what would happen next.

What followed during freshman year were many more trips to Clybourn, to concerts and parties and bars, sometimes with my new friend but often not. At the time I felt like my freshman year timeline was defined by these various trips, each a checkpoint marking how far I had come. It was the stop for my friend’s apartment first, then where I once stood in the snow instead of at a midterm quiz. It became the stop to get to my best friend’s apartment, where I stopped on more unexpected journeys with some friends I would keep and some I would lose, and finally the stop to get to my boyfriend’s apartment.

This mobility became more than a physical contagion. I began wanting to learn languages and travel, to study abroad in Istanbul, and journalism became something I grew into. Perhaps I am more compelled to write about this now that this same wanderlust has brought me to a new place, Washington D.C., to talk to people and write about things I had never thought I would, and also because the person who took me on that first trip will be filing his own adventures from halfway around the world, from what he calls the “The Wild East.” I don’t so much think of the stop anymore and my girlish checkpoint game, but of how I felt that first day, for one of the first times as open to something new as I would ever hoped to be. I strive for that self, that ability to navigate around fear or even sadness and meet it with excitement, loving each moment that is different.