Not Quite Lost on Mass Street by Ayat Dashti
I didn’t know how to pronounce Massachusetts when I first came to Lawrence. I knew it was a state, I knew it mattered, and I knew, very quickly, that I was expected to say it out loud. This street, I learned, was where people went to live their lives: to eat, to meet, to wander, to feel less alone. So I was relieved, genuinely relieved, to discover that no one actually calls it Massachusetts Street. Everyone just calls it Mass Street.
There is a particular kind of intimacy that develops between a person and a street. You learn where the sidewalk narrows, where the wind cuts harder in winter, where the smell of coffee leaks out early in the morning. You begin to recognize the pauses: the lull before evening, the quiet that arrives after most doors have locked. I’m not from here or anywhere near. I often move through public space with an inherited alertness. Streets are not neutral. They ask questions before they offer a welcome. Mass Street asked its questions slowly. It did not demand that I explain myself all at once. It let me return.
I returned on days when I felt most unsure of myself; after difficult classes, after news from home that felt too heavy to carry back to my apartment, after moments when I wondered whether I was doing any of this correctly. Walking Mass Street became a way to ground myself in motion. I did not need to perform belonging; I could practice it. The act of walking, of lingering in bookstores, of sitting alone at a café table with a notebook open but untouched, taught me that presence itself can be enough. There is something about Mass Street that resists urgency. Even when it is busy, it does not rush you. People stop in the middle of sidewalks to talk. Someone is always waiting for someone else. This looseness mattered to me. I come from places where movement is often shaped by caution; by what must be avoided. Here, I learned a different posture, one that allowed me to take up space without apology, even if only temporarily.
I did not suddenly become legible on this street. There were moments of discomfort. But there were also quieter recognitions: a barista who remembered my name and pronounced correctly, a bookstore employee who recommended a book they felt I would like, the familiar nod exchanged with someone I had never formally met. These small acknowledgments accumulated into something steadier than acceptance. They became a sense of being situated. Mass Street taught me that place can participate in self-understanding. It is where I practiced being alone without feeling lonely. Where I learned how to sit with my thoughts without immediately translating them for others. Where I allowed my languages, my histories, my contradictions to coexist without resolution. Walking past the same buildings again and again, I began to notice how my internal landscape was changing alongside the external one. What once felt foreign began to feel navigable.
I think often about how streets hold layered lives. Mass Street has been walked by students who stayed and students who left, by people whose futures unfolded exactly as planned and by those whose plans quietly dissolved. Knowing this made my own uncertainty feel less singular. I was not the first person to arrive here unsure of who they were becoming, and I will not be the last.
Now, when I walk Mass Street, I do so differently. I notice myself noticing. I recognize how my body has learned the street’s rhythm, how my pace adjusts without thought. I see how my relationship to this place mirrors my relationship to myself: less defensive, more open, still careful but no longer closed. The street has not changed. I have. Mass Street gave me a setting in which I could unfold without demand for completion. It allowed me to be in process. In a life shaped by borders, by paperwork, by explanations that never feel sufficient, that permission has meant everything.