Before I went abroad in my sophomore year, I wrote seven letters, titling each “Open in the Event of My Unlikely Death.” I wasn’t terribly afraid of dying while spending six months in Europe, but I didn’t want to be caught with my pants down either. Each letter was addressed to someone different and said essentially all those things you know you should say to certain people in your life but never have the time, the courage, or the wherewithal to actually say in the course of normal events. From what I remember of these letters, they were inevitably saccharine and melodramatic. Full of promises I never intended to keep, exaggerations intended to make me look better, and confessions of feelings that I’m not entirely sure were sincere. They were equal parts passive hostility and deliberate pleas for posthumous sympathy. It was a silly, egotistical thing to do and I bring it up now only because that last night I had at Wesleyan before I left, that night I spent hunched over my desk writing letters no one would ever read, I decided to write a letter to Wesleyan.
When I came back from Europe and burned all those letters I had written and then hidden in a desk drawer in an equally self-indulgent act, that letter to Wesleyan was the only one I kept. I can’t really say why, except that it rang truer than the rest. I’ll spare you from the overblown prose style by simply summarizing my feelings in the letter as follows:
Wesleyan doesn’t always feel like home to me, and it is not always kind to me, but I would be lost without it.
A few years later, less than a fortnight from graduation, my feelings toward Wesleyan have changed less than I would like to admit. I have had quite a few homes over the past four years. Some of them are gone and some of them are simply too far away for me to ever see again. Understand that I mean this literally and figuratively. Some of them were places, some of them were people, and some of them were simple moments in my life. Wesleyan will always be one of these homes to me. It was the first home I chose for myself. It’s a large part of how I understand who I am. It will probably be that way for a while longer.
So forgive me if I use this, my last column, to talk about myself instead of trying to save the world through some sort of incisive 900-word commentary that will cut to the heart of the problems inherent in the Western world. Because this is what’s important to me right now. And if you’re not at that point in your life where you understand and sympathize, then give it a few years.
I feel like I am living in the middle of a long, decadent wake right now. It’s still too early to be crushed by the immense anxiety of thinking about the future. But I can feel it starting to build in my stomach and the arching of my back. I can feel it coming.
By the time you read this, I will be done with college. Very soon in the days to follow, my name will be removed from the Wesleyan online directory and my library privileges will be revoked. I will run out of points for the last time and use the laundry machine for the last time. Everything will eventually be done for the last time. I’ve decided not to keep track of all the “last times” I will have in the next few weeks. My heart could never stand it. And then one day, a day that is coming sooner than I like, I will leave, a vagabond passing slowly in the night.
I have this fantasy of coming back to Wesleyan one day much later in my life. A day when everyone I know at Wesleyan will be gone. The way I imagine it, it will be like walking through history. The sort of feeling I got when I climbed Gettysburg, or saw the bed that Lincoln died in. The feeling that ghosts still haunt these places and the sheer palpability of memory. And this time, I will be the ghost. It’ll be something new for me.
I’ve never actually had to pick up and leave my life behind before, I’ve never had this feeling that my life was ending as I knew it. Fours years ago, I never thought about it as leaving high school and my hometown, I always thought about it as going to college. That wasn’t an ending, it was a beginning. Back then, it felt like my life was just starting to get interesting. But this, this is different. They call it Commencement, as if this is the beginning of something. But really, it’s the end of the beginning. They can call it whatever they want, they can make it sound exciting, but in the end it’s still some kind of an ending. And I guess a beginning too.
Sometimes I’m not sure which is scarier.
But now that it’s happening, I am amazed at how much this all feels like being in love. Like carrying something heavy and slow inside yourself, something powerful, and joyful, and sad all at the same time.
This is the beginning of a very, very slow full speed ahead.
So take care. I wish you all nothing but the best.
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