Last night, I told four people about this place. With a vodka shot singing beneath my skin, I addressed the room. My fingers gripped each other tightly as I spoke, twisting in a ball of nervousness. But I didn’t need to be nervous. Their eyes were kind, their mouths excited. Later, I found a note on my bed, left by my roommate. She told me to keep writing.
I’m still not certain that I’m ready for an audience––even for their audience––but if I can trust people with my spoken words, why not with written ones?
So, let’s try this whole “blog post” thing again.
And speaking of people, let’s speak about people. Not the kind of people that appear on Zoom screens from far away, but the kind of people who are embodied. Who exist up close.
The memories of COVID quarantine have not yet faded, and their sharpness hurts if I lean back too far. Of course, I love my family––fiercely. But my sophomore spring was not meant to be spent in relative self-isolation, uprooted and alienated from the previous realities of College Life. There was a deterioration that occurred, in a muffled kind of way.
Now, being back at Colby––wrapped in the vibrant fabric of easy laughter, hard assignments, dinner plans, late-night homework, hungover mornings, enriching conversation, interpersonal conflicts, procrastination, too-early alarms, new faces, calls home, wanting to leave, wanting to stay forever, heavy backpacks, endless reading, rushed breakfasts, [COVID-19 tests], spontaneous adventures––I have work to do.
It’s the work of Being Aware.
A hero of mine, David Foster Wallace, gave a 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. He began with a didactic little story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?'”
“The point of the fish story,” Wallace later clarifies, “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” It’s easy to coast through what surrounds me, even if that substance is life-giving. It’s easy to operate on this automatic, unconscious setting.
For me, right, now, the most obvious, important realities are those of college life (or whatever remains of it). Colby is the water.
In the face a global pandemic, I don’t want to forget this truth. I don’t want to forget about the water I’m swimming through. The myriad moments––messy mornings, raw nights, dragging afternoons––offer an opportunity to care and to work. To care and work. What else is there to do? How else are we to swim?
Perhaps my favorite quote––of all time––comes later in Wallace’s speech. He says, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” Yes, that.
To help myself remember the water, I have been referring to a poem I wrote during last spring’s lockdowns, titled “Quarantine Thoughts.” Back then, there was no water.
Quarantine Thoughts (written May 2020) The rain is coming down, and I wonder to myself, am I lonely? How strange Of all the things I took for granted, proximity was the greatest And I miss them most with sleep; when it comes, when it leaves Between falling and waking, I rest Modern loneliness, it has me cornered I’m not a scientist. I know nothing of space and time and their complex interrelations But I know how a day feels, when it’s repeated over and over as my feet draw circles through the same rooms, searching for novelty What a privilege, wasn't it? to occupy so many spaces, to travel the world in a single day My birthday comes and I am asked about desires Bodies, I want to say, voices the limitations people bring. How strange Modern loneliness, it has the introverts on their knees Several weeks ago, a friend wrote me this: A virus, something that is almost nothing, makes almost nothing out of all that was once something. And, as I sit here in my house, I wonder how it would feel to hold someone. To feel something in the face of nothing. I don’t know if he was talking about me, he probably wasn’t but I miss the way my body feels in someone else’s arms Screens are cold and their light always gives way to darkness In the space between hours, I collect my pieces I’m trying to build something new, dreaming I could be I imagine a new world, too, one that isn’t so afraid breathing in brighter colors With these walls buffering around me, I continue looking: for a hundred tiny windows, a hundred tiny views But I still count the days with birth control pills, Taking pride in those punched-out holes I still fall asleep with hope between my fingers. Waking up is the worst part, hungover from last night’s daydreams I still cry, perhaps more alone than I’ve ever been before and I still find peace in the silence that follows
Quiet Histories 