Sometimes, I want to dissolve into the atmosphere. Not in a dying sense––more like a soft, restful sleep. This desire comes when everything begins to feel very, very heavy. My clothes, my bones, my eyes. They are impossible to lift. I become a jumble of immovable parts, curled up on the floor. Jagged and grotesque.
I wanted to dissolve on April 3, 2022, after spending that past week isolated in my dorm room, testing positive for COVID-19. With nothing to do and no one to see, I was left with one miserable task: writing my thesis.
My thesis was a project I was obsessed with, controlled by, and embarrassingly behind on. I’d been pouring over its pages for months, always despising what I wrote. I could barely finish a paragraph before deciding it wasn’t good enough. Write, rewrite. Turn back, start again.
Like a sticker continually peeled and reapplied, my words were loosing their grip. Meanwhile. the paper beneath grew worn with overuse.
Even before I entered COVID-19 isolation, my thesis was a powerful force of social distancing. It cornered me in silent study spots, from which I could only be rescued by friends; insistent texts that I get dinner, get out. Gratefully, I’d comply. But during my week in isolation, I received no such texts. I wrote feverishly, for hours and hours, day in and day out. I even dreamed about writing. Pages of text appeared behind my closed lids, and I edited them in fitful slumber––only to awaken with the hollow realization that no work had been done. It was maddening.
The more work I did, the less any of it made sense. My thesis was withering away under my desperate fingers, but I couldn’t let go, not even for a few hours. Until one night, I found myself on the floor, resolved that I would never finish. Laying there, I cried and cried, until finally peeling myself off the floor, I put on a mask and headed out of my room for the first time that day.
I never walked so slowly across campus before. After every few steps I paused for a break, cradling my ribs in my arms. It must have been a strange sight: this lone girl trudging and swaying, as if on a mountain and then on a cliff. I hoped no one could see me in the dark. Painstakingly, I made my way to into the academic quad.
The quad, offering the most impressive view of Colby, has this way of cradling me. Even on the toughest nights, I could find respite there––looking up at Miller Library, its tower scraping the night sky, its stone steps and white pillars glowing in angelic light. But on that night, I remember standing beneath glow of Miller, and feeling only heaviness. I remember the weight of my cowering body, swaying in the nonexistent breeze.
I was released from isolation two days later, falling back into the arms of friends who had been waiting to catch me. In their company, the impossible weight of thesis-writing quickly dissipated. Life was re-saturated with long talks over dinner, laughter on the way to class, dancing and drinking and hungover breakfasts. And soon, my thesis pages began materializing.
But as my project neared completion, a new kind of heaviness began to settle in. The feeling was inverted: it wasn’t I who wanted to dissolve, but everything around me. Colby was slipping into the unreachable past.
Wait! I wanted to yell, just wait! But all the lasts were falling around us, like cherry blossom petals. I had my last class in Lovejoy, my last dinner in Bobs, my last late night in Miller. There was barely time to mourn these casualties.
I think my friends could feel this dissolving, too. But they were more graceful than I. They could release their hold on Colby. As they turned away from the world we had built together, and towards the open future, a new loneliness bloomed inside of me.
On the night before graduating Colby, I felt frantic. I was witnessing the end of something gigantic and invisible. The end of worlds come like this, sometimes.
Once more, I stood in the middle of the academic quad (where I would receive a diploma 12 hours later). I stood there and cried for all the things my friends and I would miss, and all the things we wouldn’t. All that we’d remember, and all that we’d forget. I felt jagged and grotesque. But there was beauty in letting myself feel all of it – in surrendering to the crushing force of something that wasn’t supposed to be sad, and letting it be so. Letting it be heavy and important.
In the past month, I’ve graduated college, moved across the country, and started my first job. I’ve left nearly everything that was and headed straight towards all that wasn’t yet.
I wish I could say I embraced the change with zeal––that I was a smiling graduate, thrilled to be starting a new chapter of life. But I wasn’t. When people talk about graduating, they never seem to mention the loss that comes with it. Maybe they should.
Because some, nights this all this feels temporary. I catch myself thinking about the fall, about our return to Colby that will, of course, not take place. I even catch myself missing my thesis, or at least, that weight which kept me so grounded in place.
Mostly though, I miss the potential of each day to be spectacular or devastating––and it hardly even mattered which.
Now I stand in the wake of this, wondering: why at the end of the story, do we begin to feel all of it? But I still have my friends, as far away as they might seem right now. And I have that strength found in solitude––found searching under the steps of Miller Library. Because on my last trip there, I found what I couldn’t in April. I found it without hands to hold me.
This is how Colby ended for me. Not with a bang, but with a soft whisper of sorrow, and deepest thanks.
Quiet Histories 