The unrivaled moments, the recollected stories

Two weeks left of classes and about one month until graduation. I’m trying to keep my head down, distract myself with work, but the butterflies bat violently in my stomach. I tried on my graduation robe a few days ago; I bought a frame for my diploma. There is so much left to do and think and feel that I’m capsizing into stillness.

But this is the time to reflect — when the veneer peels away from the platitudes and you’re left with the pure pulp of experience. When, looking back at four years, you find yourself reaching out into the haze to grab the ripened fruit of recollected stories; it tastes sweet and finishes sad on the palate. I will miss this place.

I will miss the people. I will miss the habit of writing my name on the tops of pages, swiping my J-Card through turnstiles, jaywalking across St. Paul to class. I might even miss this school’s garbled take on civic life, its short-lived cycles of outrage, muted revolt and inculcated apathy.

I will miss so many things and will refuse to let them go.

Give me the hiccups ringing down alleyways, jungle juice in every shade of moss and lilac. 18! 19! 20!-second keg stands and 3 a.m. specials with hash browns. Take me to the beach, Wyman’s winding drive, the greenhouse hut of Gilman where light and quiet sprout sonnets and noontime slumbers. Read to me from a seventh edition all-nighter, the syllabus’s recommended reading left a recluse beneath a blue jay’s plumage.

I will hold onto the reflected light from lab windows curled to crescent. I will deny reality’s approach when it tells me to forget about the unspent dining dollars, Irene and Sandy pitching wind and rain against buildings. I will remember smoke — heavy like gravity, bonging inside five chests jointed together by blunted bones.

I will always worry about late-night dance practices, guards turning corners in the library as I fill my mouth with forbidden food, viruses and sickness finishing first in Tours de Franzia.

My mind will forever wander into common rooms, MPRs, study spaces in Brody left for the taking. I will sit in Shriver’s audience with Steinem, O’Malley, Novak and Ansari. I will always drink freshly squeezed orange juice at the FFC while watching my waffles be branded with the Hopkins honorific handle. I will always hear my friends’ unmistakable laughter.

These are the things I have and there are so many of them — the unrivaled moments when, in the present’s space of an instant, I forgot how nostalgia felt.

But there is also the degree. There is the procured vault of facts and formulas, the resumé raisers and position names more for protocol than purport. But these moments and memories, heavy and golden like weights on a pendulum balance, tip the scale to more heart than head. They are what pumped this machinery with sweat and blood. They are what taught us how to fill, according to David Brooks, our moral buckets with more eulogy virtues than resumé. (“The ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”)

And after this life at Hopkins, if our hearts weigh heavy from more wicked than good, from the substance induced and inspired late-night rambles, the imbibing of laughter tucked between library stacks, then so be it.

We have our fruit and we can eat it too. We can reach back up to grab it and sink our teeth into its flesh and let it all come spilling back. Fresh and forever it will stay, impressed into the movement of days dissolving too slow and too fast.