lost something? you haven’t

reading a friend's sad post and writing this purely out of spite

i start from the self-evident truth that life goes on. but rarely is it enough to simply know something. i know when the sun sets and when it rises, but that doesn’t set the course of my day. i wake up in late afternoons and i am writing this at 5 am. i know i have two ears and one mouth, but sometimes i yap more than i listen. knowing that i was going to a four year college that was going to end in exactly four years was also never enough. now that i am at home, and i am aware that i am never to go back to that campus as an undergrad anymore, i can sense the dust of four lived up years settling in. to work through this well anticipated end would involve asking myself, “what would i have done with a little more time?” then, once i am done answering the question with one rectifying action or another, i land at the same place all over again. “what would i have done with a little more time?” if i kept doing this over and over again, i would just keep returning to the same place, much like how time travel movies always have a montage of the main character redoing one thing over and over again until they get it right. the scene is always a funny/ironic one that the writers never miss wedging in, perhaps as a reminder to the audience that “this is not how life works.”

i think senior spring was probably my favorite semester in all four years. my semester in new york comes a close second, and i say close maybe because it was new york after all, but this semester definitively had everything i wanted: good friends, good grades, good spring break trip to bangkok, and a good amount of personal growth. maybe the last one in that list is what sets it apart, because new york had almost all of those things too, but it was only good in an idyllic way, where i went in and came back pretty much the same person. i should say that i had record positive changes to my psyche since january this year, and sometimes i think that i might be saying this only to convince myself, but the fact that i can sit at home quite content and not in utter despair is actually evidence enough for me. now i walk around the house looking at my parents as regular people who possess an intact capacity for feelings and emotions, and i talk to them as i would talk to a loved one. a loved one that loves me in a way that is often strange and overbearing, but their behavioral quirks are not my crosses to bear. i can take that love to help myself (that involves eating the cut up mangoes every day), and then reciprocate with goodwill in interpreting their actions, a gentle tone in my speech, and with little hints that they are enough for me.

because home is going to be my life for the foreseeable future, i want to honor the good things that have happened to me in the past four years and pay it forward. the past semester, in particular, deserves extra credit, because i spent so much time doing what i liked doing, that at this point i am weary of breaking the streak of just having a good time. but then again, sure, a good time at home is nowhere near the good time at college, with free rein over everything in my life and a beach just ten minutes away. i didn’t do anything crazy, like i didn’t go to the beach every day, but just knowing that the beach was there only 10 minutes away made all the difference (like that line from dostoyevsky, "i see the sun, and if i don't see the sun, i know it's there. and there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there”). i might get a job and get to be even more independent again, but i’m definitely not going to be independent in the same way again. it is going to be different, but i am going to keep wishing, as i do in this moment, i could stay up with friends in my room until sunrise and go downstairs for a smoke, or to go to another dorm party that is going to be exactly the same as the one from the week before. maybe i will stay up again with friends again someday and go smoke outside at sunrise (that’s not really that hard of a thing to accomplish), but it’ll never happen exactly in the same way again. i can be happy again and again, but not in the same way twice. but in marta’s words, i guess that’s what makes life worth it. not knowing how good it can get, how bright the sun that i can’t see yet shines.

the post grad nostalgia comes from knowing that something good has happened, and if anything we should feel like walking out of the cinema after watching a feel good coming of age film, but i also understand the desire to revisit the good thing, or the temptation for a little more time. that, i suppose, comes from sidelining the prospect of more good things that are on the way. this oversight, and stubbornness over the ephemeral, is so human, and it is littered everywhere humans have set foot, including taylor swift songs. “help, i'm still at the restaurant / still sitting in a corner i haunt.” it is easy to point out to taylor that she will never find a better restaurant if she doesn’t leave dinner after it’s over, but at the core of this lyric is a tender human heart that is still full and warm from a lovely time at the table. but why does her heart have to deflate, or grow cold, as she gets up, looks up “nice restaurants near me” on her phone, and makes her way to the second restaurant of the night? sure, the second one is going to be different, but it could be just as good, or even better than the first restaurant. “but the first restaurant was good enough!” i am compelled to explain that this sort of retort innocently misses a critical understanding of what constitutes good.

something can be consistently good, but then the consistency makes us start perceiving the good thing as merely a healthy thing. like lotion is good, and moisturizing makes my skin healthy. life at home could have been good, but people just tend to say “i had a healthy childhood”. surely, there are permanent things that are good, but those good things belong in their own distinct category, and we don’t feel as viscerally about lotion or a healthy childhood as we do about life at college. for something to be good and enjoyable in the same way as life at college, it would categorically need to exist between a before and an after. otherwise, if it were to be permanent, as taylor writes in the same song, "matches burn after the other / pages turn and stick to each other”, it would kind of just become another thing, mushed together with kind of everything else. the good thing, life at college in this case, would cease to be on the same plane of enjoyment altogether. the thing that makes this time so special is probably its transience, and it is kind of ironic to mourn and sulk over the end of something we already knew was going to end, but which we chose to love regardless. did we lose anything just because something ended? everything was always going to end. but between the start and the end, if we have felt as much love as we did, and laughed as much as we did, then there is little that is lost, and littler left to mourn.

now, say, we could just teleport from one restaurant to another, from one good time to another, finish college and immediately land a million dollar job and live together with all our friends, then we would not have this whole ordeal of “processing post grad” to begin with. i wouldn’t even have to read a sad post from a friend and write my own out of spite. but here we are. in the end, it only remains for me to say that good things like this are not found in the wild. you don’t just breathe for good things to be laid out before you in silverware. the good times happened because you were there. the good friendships happened because you created them. it is different with things that you didn’t create, because once it’s over then it might just be over for good. but this? you had as much to do with making something so beautiful as everyone else involved. and there is enough solace in that, in knowing that you have the power to beget love and happiness, and there is even more strength to be found in knowing that you carry this power with you everywhere you go. i don’t think the friendships are going anywhere just because i got my degree — there would be no bigger crime than reducing my friends to contexts or boxes — i think my friends are mine to keep. while i walk to the second restaurant (employment), with my friends in my back pocket, i need to read all the susan sontag books i brought home, so that i don’t have to use taylor swift lyrics to explain my point next time.

i came home and told my parents what it was like to say goodbye to everyone. my mom started crying. my dad just looked at me and said, “the world is so small. you will see them again.” inside me there are two wolves: my mom and my dad. given, i am sad that a beautiful chapter of my life had to come to an end, but i am also content knowing that i get to keep the things that made the chapter beautiful, and and i left conscious of my unending ability to create beautiful things. i love you all!

maybe not everyone. but i hope i’ve made sure the real ones know who they are. i’ve been trying to do that all semester. i love all the real ones!