Rozcol Glasis, Class of 2024, felt a peculiar sense of calm nothingness as he boarded his 14 hour Emirates flight back to campus. No matter how unbearable the weather or how detached from reality the professors’ expectations are, he’d be returning to a place of familiar faces and creature comforts. As much as he had lived it up in London, he admitted that all he was missing in life was a spicy mixed omelet and sweet potato fries from D2.

He’d spent his Spring living in one of the world’s most dynamic cities. All without ever having to pay dynamic rent prices to live in a dynamic shoebox. Four months living as a tourist with some classes on the side. Barcelona one weekend, staying with his friend in Amsterdam the next — free of the Abu Dhabi lifestyle and groupmates who schedule project meetings at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night because there’s nothing else to do anyway. He fell in love, fell out of love, and above all felt human.

But something had felt fundamentally unbalanced amidst all the nights out, and trips, and silly cafe excursions. He wasn’t a tourist. Tourists don’t stay long enough to have to actually go to the grocery store and feed themselves without spending a hundred dirhams on a simple lunch. But, he wasn’t a local. People in the real world take time to form relationships and don’t surgically attach themselves to people that they click with, or have their pre-existing social circle always five minutes away.

On that plane, he felt like an adult. He’d done his time in the cold, anonymous city where actual dangers existed beyond heat stroke. He could see himself living here, or in New York, or Chicago… really any city that would let him feel lost in the crowd, that would let him grow. He reminisced how he would debate the ethics of fossil-fuel capitalism with some NYU New York students who had second homes in the Hamptons before going to spend 200 GBP of his slice of the oil money pie on a new pair of sneakers. He was, and still is, a living paradox — a chameleon of sorts in a landscape of incongruities.

“Attention passengers, we are about to begin our descent into Dubai. We’ll be landing in about half an hour, and the local temperature is 46 degrees. Visibility is poor.” That call summoned him to the portal of the Abu Dhabi matrix, where weeks aren’t real and semesters blend together. He fully re-entered once he had arrived on campus to get his room key and found out he had accidentally been re-assigned to the storage closet in A1A. Oh, and everything in his locker had been thrown away.

Having been too busy at home to do his laundry, he went to the laundry room. He marveled at the fact that it was simply free — no pesky coins, no app to extract money out of him with its minimum recharges. As he went back down to the dryer, he realized its price matched its utility. Upon opening the door, as he touched his clothes, they instantly got two sizes smaller, gave him a second-degree steam burn, and spilled scalding hot water into the hole in the floor.

His first proper excursion back to D2 was indeed something of a trip. He bumped into the girl in his major, Cahlinder Chloe, who he’d gotten lunch with every other Thursday from 12:45 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. last time he was on campus, but never interacted with otherwise. “You’re back! You’ve got to tell me everything,” Chloe told him. Two more acquaintances of his showed up, and as they all recounted stories of surreal nights and fleeting moments, their eyes were widened but caked with a filter of apathy. Even as Buenos Aires or Shanghai or Sydney would begin every sentence of theirs for the remainder of their time on campus, their attention was quickly diverted to the latest scandal. “Did you just see the hair someone found in their shawarma?” Chloe asked incredulously.

He was truly back into the Matrix of faux outrage and faux existential concerns. A bubble once again surrounded him, juxtaposed against real-world concerns like getting a job in the world’s most saturated market. “Are you going to tonight’s nautical networking event?” Chloe asked. In all his time having actual things to do, he’d forgotten to keep in touch with his Abu Dhabi connections as they talked about their workload at every possible moment. Ever since he accidentally knocked someone’s tray over who was not maintaining 18 chihuahuas of physical distance in his first year, no one had acknowledged his presence.

Simultaneously feeling 15, 18, and his actual age of 23, Glasis wondered if maturation was even real here. It felt like he had finished eighth grade two days ago, moved into his quarantine hotel yesterday, and went through the entirety of his study away in a dream. Would he fight against the trap, going to Dubai every weekend and refreshing the Wizz Air website more often than he checked Brightspace? Or would he sit back, laugh, and revel in the banal absurdities? “People at home already think I’m part of a cult,” Glasis thought to himself. None of the problems he faced here would see the light of day beyond the looming specter of graduation.

He surrendered. As the build-your-own pasta that he now paid more than a meal swipe for forced him to confront reality, his nostalgia and inability to grow a taste for anything better hit his taste buds. “Let’s get this over with,” he said defiantly — as if these four years would ever feel normal afterwards.