Hi!

How are ya?

Today I’m rambling about some comical lines I heard at college this week, what it feels like to look back at my university experience, and the one thing we seem to hold onto when everything else falls away.

THINGS I HEARD COLLEGE KIDS SAY TODAY

From the girl running down the stairs: “God, I need Starbucks. I’m fucking SO hungover.” And it’s, what, Wednesday? It doesn’t get better than this.

From the jock three rows behind me: “Let’s fuckingg GOO” after getting one question mildly correct and slamming his fist into his buddy’s like they just won the beer pong semi-finals. I hate that I know that. The stench of unhinged testosterone hung heavily in the air. I tried not to breathe but I think I’ve been holding my breath since freshman year.

Why could there not be one, just one, cute guy in this class? As an English major, all of my classes are predominately female. If there are any guys, they have, in my experience, tragically, and I mean well-dressed-and-charismatic-as-hell tragically, not been into girls. Do know how many wrong trees I have barked up? So when I signed up for this one, final, general education course, I prayed to every god I’ve ever heard of for one of those iconic classroom romances that I haven’t had since high school. Because, I mean, need I explain? The flighty eye contact from across the room? The feeling of their eyes on you? The anticipation of seeing them again? The borrowed pen and stolen heart? AH. I think I forgot what these things feel like. But it’s fine, really. I’ll just keep chugging along, sublimating into my school work. A 4.0, thanks for asking.

MY LANTERN

Speaking of chugging along. I was journaling in my car this morning before class, as one does, when I looked out and saw one of those “congrats grads” banners flapping in the (somehow still frigid?) wind. And it hit me that this is my final lap, that I’ll be leaving this campus by the end of the year. And, yeah, that’s exciting and immensely fulfilling and all of the big and exciting things. But more than any of that, it’s really just strange. I’m about to leave a place that I feel I have barely been. It’s like I’ve only passed through for a moment, a blip, for just long enough to say that I was there. That I kissed some boys and fell in love with some professors and read every book under the sun. That I walked around and looked at that world and had something to say about it all. Yet some days my own hand is still blurry in front of my face. Which is to say, I don’t always know where I am or how I got there, but I do always seem to have an array of ideas for what it might all be for. Not answers, but a million and one ideas that are like little lighthouses guiding me through.

Writing is one of those. Writing might actually be the parent of them all. It is this lantern that never, ever goes out. It doesn’t dim. It grows. It keeps me really, really warm, even when I’m just standing in the cereal aisle at the grocery store or walking down the street. When I think about college and what I have to show for it, it’s simply that. And that’s everything to me.

As for the rest? I’m not sure. Like I’ve said before, time has failed to make sense for a while now. Not in a terrible way, just in an endlessly fascinating kind of way. Like I can’t stop trying to imagine where the hell January, March, or May went. I’ve looked under the bed, in the closet, on my own skin. I’ve opened my mouth really wide and said “aah” because maybe I swallowed them. Why else can I still feel them swimming in my stomach when I can’t see them anymore?

We’ll never know. It doesn’t help that I’m graduating early in December, when they don’t even hold a ceremony. Between that and the cancellation of my high school ceremony, someone really should have told me at my eight grade graduation that it was the last one I would ever have. Thank god we weren’t thirteen and awkward and unable to enjoy life or something atrocious like that. Oh wait.

Okay, okay. That was a lot of my heart, bleeding all over the place. Here’s something else, for fun: a writing prompt from the one and only Natalie Goldberg. “Everything you know about vanilla.” Go.

EVERYTHING I’VE EVER KNOWN ABOUT VANILLA

1. Iced vanilla lattes. That was fourteen. It was all that we drank and they were divine. We didn’t care about the sugar yet and caffeine was still new and exciting. It made us feel older than we were. (TW) I used to suck those lattes down all of the time with my best friend and then one day they became the only thing she would ingest. Sweet coffee stopped being a fun thing and started being a dangerous thing that was allowing her to slowly kill herself, one skipped meal at a time. I don’t think that I’ve had a vanilla latte since then.

2. Soft serve with my father as a child. I remember holding a tall spiral of creamy vanilla with rainbow sprinkles covering the sides and thinking that that was all that happiness would ever look like. Do you remember that? When an ice cream cone could hold up your whole world?

3. My perfume. I wear it everyday and I know that when I stop, it will become one of those scents that brings you to your knees with memories. These college days and all of their horrifying, beautiful, perfect stories will forever smell like vanilla perfume. I know that much will be true.

4. Baking chocolate-chip cookies as a child and dabbing vanilla extract on my wrists, perfume’s precursor, so that for the rest of the day I would smell like home. I would dance around the kitchen in my bare feet as this small and delicate thing with my wrists pressed to my nose and my hair twirling around my body as Ella Fitzgerald danced in my ears. My mother was always playing that gorgeous kind of music on Sunday afternoons and so they became my favorite. Vanilla extract still smells like them.

WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE FALLS AWAY

What scents carry all of the memories for you? Aloe hand sanitizer will always smell like preschool to me and if I ever catch a whiff of an apple strudel NYX butter gloss again, I just know that the pink chemicals will smell exactly like seventh grade. Smell is one of those few aspects of a memory that we can still experience in the present, after everything else has fallen away. I can’t hear preschool, I can’t clearly see whatever I was doing, and there is no taste to bring any of it back. But the smell of that one hand sanitizer and I’m somehow there again, remembering things I never knew. Funny how that works.

So much love. -m

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