Hi!

How’s the world today?

I’m in the process of moving out of my first apartment and it’s quite comical. Today, for example, I found a mini bottle of vodka from my crazy sophomore year roommates hidden in the kitchen. Sounds about right.

But packing this apartment up is also eerie, trippy, emotional. Here’s why.

THE END OF AN ERA

I walked in there today (after a long absence due to not being able to withstand living on frat row any longer), and it was quiet. And that place was never quiet. All you ever heard were slamming doors and music and the unmistakable cacophony of squealing, drunken girls running down the hallways. The weekends were total nightmares. Personally, I got over college partying pretty quick and spent most of my Friday nights cooking elaborate meals and curling up with a stack of books or the latest episode of Survivor. So I heard it all. The music that poured out of doors every time they opened to let another intoxicated youth in or out, the honking of cars, the footsteps pounding up and down the corridors. But not today. Today it was empty. The lights were off. There was one stray red solo cup on the elevator floor and some glitter that stuck to my shoes and that was the only proof that any of it was real. That I really did used to sit in that apartment and write all night to the abrasive sounds of youth screeching all around me while feeling anything but young.

I remember those nights. They were lonely, but they gave me perspective. They shattered my illusions of what I thought that college would be and illuminated what actually mattered to me. Which, as it turned out, was not partying or fitting in or what sexy costume I was going to be wearing on Halloween. I realized simultaneously that my life would be infinitely easier if they had been. I knew that. I knew that at fifteen when high school parties first revealed themselves to be nothing like the movies. But there I was, nineteen, and figuring it out all over again.

So as I sifted through drawers of clothes and boxes of pots and pans, I also sifted through the past three years. The years that melted like strawberry ice cream on a hot summer sidewalk. One month pooling right into the next in a puddle of sweetness that you can only stare at. That you can only imagine the sweetness of because it has long since been contaminated by the dirt of the real world. College was that perfectly rounded scoop of strawberry ice cream before it hit the sizzling ground, before I pulled it out of the sky and brought it down to earth.

And that is when I learned that some things, that most things, are not perfect. That when you crack an egg and drop it into a hot skillet, its molecular structure reorganizes itself in a way that can never be undone. College was a protein denatured. It was one thing, it was the possibility of finding my people and feeling like a normal twenty year old, and then it was another. It was falling in love with gothic literature and writing and learning to ask questions and see the world through a kaleidoscope, one swirling section dedicated to every author, every artist, every professor who changed me. I suppose that makes me the protein that got denatured, molecularly reconfigured, permanently altered.

So it hasn’t been like strawberry ice cream. Not in the way that all of the movies make you think it will be. No, it has been a lot more like standing on the edge of the entire world all by yourself and being moved to tears by the sheer beauty and vastness of what exists beyond you. It has felt infinite. Yet there is an end. I can see it. These past years are already crystallizing into another story, another closed chapter to process the ending of, the beginning of, and all that swam in between.

That’s what I was thinking in that apartment today. As I sat on the floor, sifting through memories that feel like whole rooms in my mind where the lights have all been turned off and the balloons have all fallen to the floor. They are still there, but so quiet now. Just like my apartment. My roommates have all left for home. The walls are bare. It’s time to go now.

TO KNOW THE END

But I was thinking about that. I was thinking about how this fall will be my last first day of school and about all of the things that I will do for the last time within the span of those final months before it is truly time to go. December graduates don’t get ceremonies at my university. They lump everyone together into one, massive graduation in the spring. I’ll be in New York by the spring, so I have accepted that I, somehow, will have graduated from both high school and college without ever having putting on a cap and gown. At first, this was obviously strange news. This is what you get for graduating early? But thinking about all of those final moments made me realize something today. To get those final moments, to be able to walk across campus for the last time and know that it is the last time, to walk out of my last class one day and know that I will never come back, that we will never meet again, that this is, in fact, the end—that will be enough. I don’t need a ceremony, I don’t need my name called out on a microphone, I just need those moments. The ones that a global pandemic robbed me of the last time that they were set to be mine. That will be enough for me.

Love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

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