poignant

Late the following morning, I picked her up from beside the quad. Her grin was uncontrollable as she got into the car, and her voice, usually measured, was a barely punctuated garble of names and details. Had I read Andrey Platonov’s “Foundation Pit” (she’d been to a class on it)? She met this kid who. . . . It was pledge night for boys trying to get into fraternities. . . . There was a picnic. . . . Everybody’s door was open. . . . They stayed up until after midnight, talking and singing. . . . She played a borrowed ukulele. . . . There was a boy who’d been a year ahead of her at elementary school in Seattle. . . . Everybody said. . . .
She’d picked up the slang and was talking ProFros and RoHos.
“I haven’t seen you like this since you were 7,” I said.
“I’m so excited, it’ll make the rest of high school unbearable if I get to thinking too much about it.”
She calmed down over lunch. Her great worry, she said, had been that she would never again have friends as close as those she made at high school; that college students would keep themselves to themselves and be hard to get to know. Overnight all her fears had been gloriously dispelled. Her two-house life in Seattle had, she said, helped ready her to go away. “At least I know I can survive without one parent at a time.”

This essay made me misty, poignant in a lot of ways.