I have this nightmare in which I stand in the middle of an enormous continent, dry and barren, while cracks fissile out around me. Movement begins along these cracks, the land is carried away. All my people are carried away. I scream and scream.

Who would ever want to be the last one standing? To become the only human sound? Sprinkling dirt with the last human tears?

The Earth’s crust is traced with cracks. In geology, we call them fault lines. I learn about geology during my freshman year of college, sitting next to a boy who will become my first love. Even in September, I can feel it: the stirring. The beginning of something new and historic. Like the Earth, I guess. Its creation and recreation.

Earth is 4.543 billion years old. No one here will see that age change, which comforts me. Because even if “the end of the world” were to transpire, it wouldn’t be the end, not really. Earth will keep getting older, after our world ends.

Earth formed when heavy elements collided and their gravity pulled in swirling gas and dust. The dust will linger long after we take our last breath of it. It will fill our footprints and cover our cities. Earth’s dust is fundamental without reason. Like love, I guess.

Except, I don’t know if love can exist without lovers.

The boy and I both dread GEO141. But we sit together in the front row of our lecture hall. We are alone up there, and it occurs to me that we are acting very young. The seniors in the back probably scoff at our attentiveness.

He uses old-fashion pencils, the yellow kind that need sharpening. And there’s a small birthmark on his hand, between his thumb and pointer finger.

I am very focused on what my eyes are doing. They look straight ahead. My face appears focused. Sometimes, I am so good at appearing attentive that I forget to hear what the professor says.

The first time I let my eyes slide over to the boy’s notes, we are learning about the moon’s formation. Which, according to giant-impact theory, occurred when Earth collided with another planet. The collision was so massive that debris from Earth’s crust and mantle spewed into orbit, accreting to form the moon. The moon still pulls at Earth’s oceans. It likes to remind us of where it once came.

After the human apocalypse, the moon will finally reclaim its brightness. I imagine that moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, will turn back toward the glowing orb. They must miss it terribly.

For our first exam, I memorize the geological time scale, with all its iterations of “zoic.” Some periods are more important to remember than others, like the Cambrian Period, a time of rapid life expansion. Organisms were quickly diversifying and growing more complex. I wonder what the air sounded like, with all those new creatures breathing it. Earth only got louder when the dinosaurs arrived.

Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 165 million years, which is an unqualified success in the history of life. We don’t talk about dinosaurs in class, though, probably because they make humans look bad.

I don’t talk about the exam either, because he scored half a point higher.

Another important point on the geological time scale is the most recent glaciation period, often known as the Ice Age. The Ice Age reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago, forming the glaciers of today. We learn about glaciers in October: they form as snow is compressed over many centuries, creating massive bodies of ice.

Glaciers seem like they will last forever, but they don’t. Today, they’re disappearing at an accelerated rate. When the professor talks about climate change, he calls it our “daily dose of guilt.” He smiles apologetically and shrugs his shoulders. I feel exhaustion slip inside me.

I don’t understand how ice and love are on their way out, while Earth’s dust gets to last an eternity longer.

We don’t talk about fossil fuels in class, but we do, extensively, about three types of rock: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. “Different rocks form under only certain conditions, which can tell us something important about the past,” the professor says.

Igneous rocks are formed deep within the earth, in a place melty and forbidden. I wonder if they like being pushed to the surface, or if they miss the warmth below. Metamorphic are formed from other rocks that are changed by heat and pressure. Sedimentary are formed from layers of sand, silt, and dead plants. How this layering process is consistent enough to create the same rocks, I have no idea.

Which type are you? I want to ask the boy. But it is 9AM, and he is still sipping coffee from a paper cup. Instead, I ask my question about sedimentary rocks. And forget to hear the answer.

I score higher than him on our second exam. Not by much, though. Now we can pretend to have a rivalry.

As the semester comes to a close, we focus on plate tectonics: the movement of the large plates of rock on the planet’s surface. Mantle flowing beneath Earth’s crust causes plates to shift, which in turn, changes the landscape.

The surface of the Earth is like a cracked eggshell. Which is a terrifying simile. I sit in class and try to ignore the truth of magma below.

Our professor draws diagrams on the board, composed of rectangles and arrows. Collisions and friction gave rise to mountains and volcanoes, he explains; “What happens when the plates slip?”

“Earthquake,” we recite in monotone voices. Most earthquakes are too small to be felt or cause damage. Large earthquakes are less common but can cause significant harm to the things we count on in everyday life. They change everything. They are world-ending.

“Who has experienced an earthquake?” he asks us.

I don’t raise my hand. But my heart is racing. I want to tell the boy that I’ve never been kissed before.

The Earth’s crust is traced with cracks. In geology, we call them fault lines. Along these fault lines, rocks slide up, down, or past each other. The movement is usually gradual and impossible to detect. Until something slips.

Please, I whisper to them, don’t slip. I’m not ready for my world to change.  

Instead, I think about other inevitable things. Like how he will ask to study together for the final. And how I will stay up that night, hoping the apocalypse waits for me to fall, at least once.

-mwp

During our January term, my best friend and I took a road trip through the Pacific Northwest and northern California. The trip was funded by Colby, and to secure this funding, Hayden and I proposed a “place-based writing project.” We would read stories about the places we were exploring and then write our own stories, in conversation with both the authors and landscapes. The project was approved.

It was a pretty good deal.

The story I wrote was inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit writes about the Blue of Distance in a way I find intoxicating.

We stole colors, right from the edge of the world. Driving down Highway 1, from Puget Sound to Big Sur, the boy and I dipped our fingers in new landscapes and vibrant pallets. Each fold of coastline was different, each stretch of highway novel. At first, Hayden and I tried describing the colors to each other. We tried holding them in our mouths. But as the hues grew richer, our words turned stale. Neither of us minded the silence that elapsed between us. During those weeks on the road, silence was our third companion. She pushed our faces to the windows, imploring us to look, look. We looked.

And when the time was right, we each picked one color and pocketed it.

I don’t know when adventure became thievery, but it was probably after breathing inside became dangerous. The Covid-19 pandemic was entering its third year, and a new omicron variant was sweeping the country. News of rising cases and new lockdowns awaited us on the radio. We rarely turned it on. During our college years in Maine, Hayden and I had seen life grow bleak and brittle, we’d watched our futures tip over and pour out. Now, months away from graduation, he and I were stepping onto a bleached terrain. What else was there to do, but go search for the colors ourselves?

In January 2022, the colors we acquired felt like survival secrets, rations of hope. They didn’t exist in quarantines, hospitals, or collapsing economies. They existed only on the world’s edges, which are, by design, prepared for the unknown. Hayden took green with him, I’m sure of it. I saw him carry the color from the hills of Big Sur. I felt it sitting in the consul between us, still dripping with afternoon light, filling the cup holders.

Big Sur was the most southern point of our trip and driving that rugged stretch of coast felt like finishing a pilgrimage. Flanked on one side by the Santa Lucia Mountains and on the other by the Pacific, Highway 1 was reduced to a thin pen line, tracing rocky ledges like a calligrapher. Behind the wheel, Hayden took the bending curves at a careful pace. My breath was loud against the window. The landscape glowed from the inside out, as if it had swallowed the afternoon sun. Big Sur’s headlands were wrinkled velvet, cascading down towards the sea. They crumbled across the highway, forming a shoreline of yellow cliffs below, like a shelf of rough-cut gold. Far below, creamy waves washed up against the tendrils of land.

Reaching a particularly elevated stretch of road, near the Bixby Bridge, Hayden pulled over. Car doors slammed and our feet scrambled to the edge of highway, in a hurry. Wind whistled around my body as I walked through curtains of afternoon light, feeling a sense of limpidness in the sudden gravity of this place. It was time to pick our colors. We didn’t say this, but we both knew. Hayden pointed to the green: the color of coastal sage scrub. Sage covered the ridged hills in buttery strokes, catching light and shadow with each wrinkle of land. Branches filled the crevices of cliffs, vines marbled rock faces. The scrub looked like fur on a giant sleeping beast, tempting a hand to run along the creature’s back.

Draped over the terrain, Hayden’s green was the color which held everything together: of life clinging to the edges. It was the stuff of subsistence. While Hayden carried away the folds of green, I looked outwards, towards the thinnest breath of blue.

During our trip, I’d fallen in love with the horizon. Or rather, the layers on the horizon: the way remote mountain ranges lay flat together, as if cut from sheets of tissue paper. From the edge of Highway 1, I could see the bluffs turn silver and turquoise far away. They grew flatter and more translucent with distance, as if dissolving into sky. Finally, on the far edge of what I could see, the land was blue. The color was dreamy, almost forlorn. Hayden and I could drive and drive and never reach it. The color existed in the atmospheric distance, in the thick afternoon light and sheets of ocean mist. I carefully swirled that blue around my thumb and pulled it up into my sleeve.

I didn’t feel bad about taking a color so thin and delicate. Nor was I envious of the velvety green spilling from Hayden’s hands, full-bodied and sustaining. It was poetic, I thought, for us to carry both richness and fragility with us. But this poetry soon evaporated. Or rather, it was burned away.

Two days after Hayden and I departed from Big Sur, a fire burned through it. The blaze, known as the Colorado Fire, burned 700 acres in Monterey County, forcing evacuations and the closure of Highway 1. It scorched the hills surrounding Bixby Bridge, right where we had taken our colors.

Hayden and I learned of this while parked on a dark street in Seattle. The news scattered across the dashboard. And then silence elapsed between us. It was not the friendly kind of silence, pushing our faces to the windows. Instead, she bent our necks towards my phone, towards the burning images of Big Sur, imploring us to look, look. We looked. And I felt the blue turn in my pocket.

 The National Weather Service reported that this was “surreal fire behavior” given California’s wet winter, and because the coastal area had no fire history. I tried to imagine what “surreal” meant. Not in levels of predictability, but in colors. I imagined the sky was soup, boiling and stirring. The sea reflected the sky, a devastating, home-cooked red. The hills were ablaze; the sleeping beast was being scorched. I imaged the creature writhing in agony, as the fire burned down its spine. The sage became a scribble. The horizon was beginning to charcoal.

Memory is a strange thing, as it allows us to paint worlds which no longer exist. For Hayden and me, the Big Sur we saw has become fiction, fading away just as life before the global pandemic did. These memories of “the before” grow fainter with time, and sometimes, we need to repaint them.

Fortunately, we still have colors with us: the green and the blue. They fill the distance between the burned landscape and the unburned one. Between the world that is sick and the world that is not. And colors will continue to fill the distance between Hayden and me. Love and loss and melancholy are all twisted up in friendship, for the desire to be close wrestles with the inevitable space between us. And after graduation, we will each enter the bleak terrain and paint something new. I hope to see his colors on the horizon. And I will have no choice, but to look across the distance without wanting it up close.

-mwp

I submitted the first chapter of my thesis on Monday. Which indicates, I think, the end of the beginning of senior year. I’m fully in it now. And I have a secret to share: I am not happy.

This fall has not left me smiling or beaming with joy. In truth, I am largely suffering. My feet drag throughout the day while my heart begins to race after dinner. I have grown irritable, chiseled away by stress and fatigue.

Sometimes, I find myself standing so still, frozen in the middle of simple tasks by the weight of my own shoulders. Sometimes, I feel like my clothes are full of water. Sometimes, I work until I forget to feed myself. Sometimes, I cry in the bathroom before walking in to class.

Maybe my lack of joy comes with the times; we are all swimming in the backwash of a global pandemic. Everyone is trying to remember who they were before 2020; and I’m guessing very few are succeeding. The nation’s collective trauma manifests in each of us. I can feel all my COVID-19 resolutions fading away––to be grateful for movement and action, to enjoy the vibrancy of college life. In fall 2021, I mostly just feel tired.

Maybe my lack of joy comes with academic burnout; the chronic condition resulting from a (literal) lifetime of school. Senioritis would be the most convenient explanation––but it also feels the least true.

As a student, I can think and write about things that are real, while keeping my distance from them. I can engage with what terrifies me––climate change, capitalism, women’s oppression, etc.––on a theoretical level. I can break down hierarchies in my papers. I can change the world in a single presentation.

Maybe my lack of joy then comes with senior year itself; the constant knowing that school is almost over. This Colby world of brick buildings, and loud dorm rooms, and long nights in the library will not belong to me much longer. Come May, I will be thrown out on the streets of real life.

I’m glad it’s not May. I’m grateful for the months of college still ahead. I’m happy to be here, but not like happy, happy. Not like the smiling kind. More like the kind of happy in which you’re happy to be alive but also angry that life is so damn hard.

In my senior year of college, I am surrounded by wonderful friends and fascinating work. I know these may well be the “good old days” I cherish forever.

And yet, joy is scarce. I guess I just thought I would feel it everywhere, all the time.

I’ve spent so much of this semester feeling frustrated with my own general unhappiness. Please, I’ve begged myself, try to appreciate this time. Try to be happy. But now, I’m starting to realize something else. Maybe a good, meaningful senior year has nothing to do with bliss. Maybe senior year has everything to do with feeling anxious and angry.

I take comfort in a little book called How To Be Perfectly Unhappy by Matthew Inman. He says, “I’m not happy, and I don’t pretend to be. Instead, I’m busy, I’m interested, I’m fascinated. I do things that are meaningful to me, even if they don’t make me happy.” Our sense of happiness is so brittle, Inman says, it can be destroyed simply by asking whether or not it exists.

I feel differently from how I felt this summer. And last year. I guess I feel worse. I’m working hard and worrying often. I’m writing my thesis, and I failing to write my thesis. But I’m doing my best and then doing it again.

I’m doing my best better than I’ve done it before.

So, don’t ask me if I’m happy. Don’t ask me if I’m having a fun and fabulous senior year. I’ll tell you no. I’ll tell you instead that I’m busy, I’m interested, I’m fascinated. I’ll tell you that I’m brimming with ten thousand moving parts.

-mwp

My name is Matilda. And it’s a great conversation starter.

Typically, I offer my name to a narrow slice of people: nurses, bank employees, TSA agents, etc. Those people who sit behind desks and require formal identification. “Name?” they ask in a monotone voice. But when I provide it––Matilda Peck––their eyes light up. They smile with recognition. Maybe this is what celebrities experience, with a name already known and loved.

“Have you read the book Matilda?” the administer asks. “Have you seen the movie?” It’s their favorite. When I was younger, I was bored by this routine conversation. But now, I’m grateful for the touchstone. Especially because that Matilda, the one in reference, these is a superhero.

Matilda Wormwood is the protagonist in Roald Dahl’s bestselling 1988 novel, which was adapted to film in 1996. She is an exceptionally bright young girl, with burgeoning psychokinetic powers. A precocious reader, Matilda frequents the public library to escape her negligent family. After entering school, Matilda quickly excels and befriends her teacher, Miss Honey, who grows into a parental figure. Meanwhile, the school’s headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, is terrorizing students with excessive and strangely creative punishments. Seeking to avenge Trunchbull’s victims, Matilda uses her telekinesis to pose as a ghost and haunt the principle. Trunchbull runs away, never to be seen again, and Matilda and Miss Honey find their happy ending amidst books and learning.

Intelligent, courageous, kind, and with supernatural capacity, Matilda Wormwood is truly extraordinary. She has done a great service to all the Matildas of the world; giving us association with brilliance and bravery. I am lucky to share my name with her. In more casual introductions, I’ve even started referencing her, just to get on someone’s good side: “Hi my name’s Matilda, and I can move things with my mind.” This always gets a laugh. And luckily, no one asks me to prove it.

Contrary to popular assumption, however, I was not named for Roald Dahl’s character. I was named after my grandmother. Matilda was my father’s mother, and she died many years before I was born. Sometimes, she feels as fictional and far-away as Matilda Wormwood. But I imagine she was just as extraordinary.

My name is also Tilly. Which is not a conversation starter. What kind of name is that? I imagine my acquaintance wondering. “It’s short for Matilda,” I sometimes add. As if I need to justify it.  

Tilly is the name I chose for myself when I was ten. There were many reasons for this choice, most of them private, some painful. For now, I’ll just say that ten was a challenging age. After nine years of just being kids, the world suddenly divided us into boys and girls. Or rather, started giving weight to those previously flimsy titles. Started applying them like heavy makeup.

Being a kid––when you can be everything and become anything––was very different from being a girl. Being a girl came with rules, expectations, and scary bleeding vaginas. It meant being polite and agreeable, and having to wear a dress for Picture Day. At ten, I could see the forked road ahead: One path led towards glorious manhood, the other led somewhere hushed and narrow, like the tampon aisle. And I did not want to go to that tampon aisle. So, I buried any femininity under baggy shorts and big tee-shirts. “Olive drab,” was how my mom described my style. On the brink of adolescence, dressing like my brothers felt like the safest option. Being a boy gave me time to figure out how to be a girl. 

While dragging my feet on the doomed path towards tampons, I felt everything else spinning out of control. In school, I was painfully shy (maybe if I was a boy, they would have called me “reserved”), and I was always falling behind. Everything we learned felt stifling, as if it were designed to make me confused and miserable. Spelling games and math fractions and random history lessons washed over me in thick, nonsensical stew. Fourth grade was the climax of elementary school: stuff was hard, but nothing had meaning yet. I remember sitting in class and feeling a dull panic. Like I’d never get a grip.

That year was a series of awkward steps towards who I was becoming. And the biggest one, of course, was becoming Tilly. While many things didn’t fit––being a girl, being a student, being in fourth grade––that name did. Tilly fit perfectly. Scraping together any self-assurance I had left, I pulled the name over my chest like armor.

In truth, I’ve always loved the name Matilda. I just haven’t figured out how to wear it. Which sounds silly, of course, because I’ve been Matilda since birth. But while Matilda is this big, worldly thing I was born into, Tilly is what I built from scratch. It was the first thing I really claimed for my own.

Wearing Tilly on my chest for over a decade, I’ve carried Matilda in my pocket. I only pull the name out for formal introductions, identity verification, and paperwork. Recently though, I’ve felt curious about it. I wanted to try Matilda on for size.

I decided to go by Matilda at work this summer, casually as well as formally. The full name experience. It was bizarre to hear my colleagues integrate “Matilda” into their everyday vernacular. They did it so easily, like the name weighed nothing. In meetings, they addressed me without any hesitation, as if Matilda were a name, and not a conversation topic.

Maybe none of this makes sense. Maybe it’s far too much reflection on a name––something typically left unquestioned. But here we are. And I want to leave you with one final thought: the meaning of my name.

Matilda, also spelled Mathilda and Mathilde, is the English form of the Germanic name Mahthildis, which loosely translates into “strength” and “might.” This translation has always resonated me, even when the name itself feels big and strange. As a small person, who tends to be passive and self-sacrificing, strong is the welcomed antithesis to what I appear to be. Mighty is what people don’t expect. And when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed––when that dull panic of fourth grade returns––I think about Matilda, and how I am named to overcome adversity.

This is how I see it now: Tilly is the person I’ve built. Matilda is the builder.

-mwp