I was on the phone with my mom the other day, trying to explain to her how strange it still feels to be here, for my running routes to now come with views of Manhattan. Lost in thought one moment, I look up only to be startled by the Statue of Liberty standing in the distance, yanking me back into reality. When did that become reality?

Was it always going to feel this unreal, or is there a version where it makes sense? Is there a parallel dimension tucked into some fold of the universe where time makes at least some semblance of sense? Where when I hear myself say the words when I was in college, a part of me doesn’t go cold?

GAPS IN TIME

I said those words the other day and they felt foreign in my mouth.

I spit them out into my hand to look for evidence of validity, only to find emails concerning graduation ceremonies and diplomas in my inbox. My own resume with my degree listed on it. Photos of my graduation party in my camera roll. I pin them up to a bulletin board like a detective gathering evidence, the evidence of my own life. And what I find are gaps, periods of time that no one can account for. They say that we forget the middles of things. It’s the beginnings and ends that bookmark our lives. Those are the things we hold onto, the memories that confirm milestones in our minds. But what if you lost the beginning and the end? What if all you had was a murky middle, the edges utterly unconfined, pieces morphing into one another like cookies placed too close together in the oven?

I’ve come to understand that there will always be an aching space where my freshman year of college was supposed to be. Derailed by the pandemic, I completed those first two semesters virtually and the disorienting effects of that are with me still. Having been yanked prematurely from my senior year of high school without any goodbyes and then plopped right into college while the world was on fire, the pandemic was a current dragging me under the only coherent concept of time that I had. And you don’t fight a current.

While I can never be sure, I like to think that if I had experienced some shred of normalcy during that first year, if I had had an orientation or a freshman dorm or any of the things that starting college is stamped by, I might feel as if it really happened. I might not feel like an imposter every time I speak of college in the past tense. I moved onto campus my sophomore year and what came next felt like just one moment. College was just one moment, blurry and ephemeral, and then it was over, as silently as it had begun.

I simply finished college one day in December, walking off campus and into my car only to never look back. They only hold graduation ceremonies in the spring, so that was it. I essentially gave college an Irish goodbye. I don’t wish I were still there, I don’t wish I had stayed with my peers for another semester and gone through the ritual of a graduation ceremony. But I do wonder if it would have made it feel more real. If my degree would be something that I don’t keep forgetting that I have.

BILLY PILGRIM

It makes me think of Vonnegut. Of Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

That is the opening line of Slaughterhouse-Five, the one that my high school AP Literature teacher highlighted, over and over again. He loved that line. He loved it in the kind of way that you could tell really haunted him and that didn’t make sense to us. We were seniors and coming unstuck in time sounded like a scintillating disruption from the utter monotony that our days embodied back then. We would have loved if Vonnegut’s alien creatures, Tralmalfadorians for those of you who are cool, descended into that rancid classroom and offered to pull us through space and time until we couldn’t see straight. Our unmarred understanding of time afforded us such luxuries of fantasy.

We didn’t know that in just a few months, we too would come unstuck in time, falling right through the ground that up until that point, we had had no reason to believe was not solid.

It didn’t make sense back then, but it does now. Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time and so did we. I became so unstuck that year that a part of me has been grabbing at dates and milestones ever since. Like someone who has lost their glasses, I am on my hands and knees, grasping for clarity in the dark.

I hope it never fully makes sense. I hope that looking up to see Manhattan will always be a little bit surreal.

Happy Sunday. ❤

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