goodbye to all that

maybe the rose colored glasses are the friends we made along the way.

1.

i caught myself wondering what it’ll feel like to sleep in my own bed next week. i did not notice it at all, that these past few years my bed back home has slowly been releasing itself from my name. this is not something i am being a wuss about or struggling to wrap my head around, because i will get used to it by the first or second week back, but it is that vague anxiety that for the first few days i might feel like i am sleeping on someone else’s bed. even though sleeping on someone else’s bed ranks pretty high up on the list of disquieting things, it is also there on the adjacent list of normal, commonly done things, so this is still not quite the issue. what irks me is that something, my bed, was once mine, fully, but had stopped being mine at some point, and now i have to rekindle the possession. the bed is but only an allegory. i am almost a stranger to the person i was when i last slept on that bed and knew it to be fully mine, and so this is also about rekindling with some past version of myself — how strange it is to meet a smaller you.

2.

when you look back at your life, it is always rosy. bad things feel dumbed down and happy things shine brighter in memory. no one ever says “i wish that one thing didn’t make me so happy”, but everyone who has ever found happiness is bound to say something like “i was so silly for letting that one thing get me down”. i spent all of last semester dealing with this one thing, and i was so sad i thought i was going to die. i thought the world was unfair and i hated the sound of people outside my window and i started to get frightened every time someone came up to me. i can’t believe i thought that was it, because i am so grateful now for everything that followed. so for reasons pertaining to, just, human nature, i cannot promise being entirely factual as i go on to say, “this was a good run”. but in this moment, as i look back with my rose colored glasses and all, i am tempted to resolve that i did really like my time here! of course, i had to take mvc twice, and i am still graduating without a math minor, and that sucks. but i also spent countless hours yapping and making close friends story content, and all of that made me into a person i like so much now. the point is that i can still afford to wear these rose colored glasses only because i have some of you with me, and whether or not i am being delusional about the rest of my undergraduate experience is secondary. maybe the rose colored glasses are the friends we made along the way.

3.

there is this car seat headrest song that goes, “you can never tell the truth, but you can tell something that sounds like it.” it is a beautiful song, but what this line says is not all that original. it is essentially a one line summary of all postmodernist thought: language is a poor medium for conveying reality. i think we forget this sometimes, and narrow our focus on each other’s words too often. there will always be aberrations to what we mean when we talk about it, in the same way that when we see something nice and want to capture it, the photo is never quite as good as what we actually see. i think we should make peace with this, because the photo is the best we can have, and there really is nothing more to do than to roll with that. there will always be more things to say, more things to hide, and so many things we will never know. the worst thing to do would be to keep digging in one spot, and we should try to do a little better than that. as you grow older you also realize that other people are involved in writing your story too. even more so, when other people read your story, they can choose what pages to read, or in what order. however you look at it: all the guilt, shame, peace, and love that you hoard, other people have a claim to it as well, for better or for worse. (and i am glad to have some of you be a part of my peace and love.)

4.

it was so different when i first came here; saying yes or no rarely used to be my call. now i say yes when i want to and no i when i dgaf about the person asking. it also soaked up so much of the stress of being alive. this is a little harder to articulate than it is to feel it: the lightness of being able to just be. reading a bit of susan sontag probably helped me move in this direction (she dgaf). i can’t tell what exactly clicked but i realized you don’t always have to shoulder the weight of everything: most things are just being, and you too, like most things, can just be. but this is not to say that i am rejoicing in some sort of emotional bankruptcy, rather, i have learned to care in slightly more meaningful ways. like being less angry at the world, because the world is so large that my anger would do little to change anything. instead, i can be nice and have that make a world of difference to someone else, like people have often been to me. every time someone has been nice or kind to me in some capacity has in turn made me a kinder person. everything good about me, at least the parts that matter, is an accretion of all the good in the people around me. if i am going back to my bed back home as a kinder person, then that is as good a thing i can ask for out of these four odd years.

epilogue.

this is how joan didion ends her essay, Goodbye to All That:

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire.

We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.”