Amid the usual onslaught of midterms and essays, it becomes startlingly easy to lose your grasp on time. The clock hands turn a little too fast for our liking, hours slip away to Brody study sessions and anxious Gradescope submissions, and days become measured not by sunset or sunrise but instead how many energy drinks you’ve downed.
During one lecture, my friend leans over, while we’re not focusing on plane-to-plane transformations, to ask: “Can you believe it’s already Halloween? What are you doing this weekend?”
The question stings. How is it almost November? How is it that I’ve already spent two and a half months scrawling down Baltimore, MD on addresses for envelopes? How is it that so little and yet so much time has passed, and nothing feels changed?
Time is strangely doubled in college. Each day stretches on, labored and asymptotic, but each week disappears with a quiet violence.
You tell yourself — you’ll go back to that one restaurant. You’ll call your mom and your dad and your brother and tell them you love them. You’ll walk that one tree-lined block again before the leaves lose themselves to the cold cement, and then you’ll blink. You’ll remember all the leaves have already fallen, crunched to a fine brown dust. They’re gone: Everything lives in hindsight here.
So then, what happened during that lost time? Have I changed: become smarter, kinder, better? Or have I performed the motions of growing up, to keep moving forward even when it all feels suspended?
Think on how it all happens so rapidly and imperceptibly: the person I was in August, back home in Oklahoma, still lingers somewhere, faint but not gone. That’s the strange mercy of it: Our younger selves cling to us, just barely discernible. We don’t notice as younger parts of us slowly molt away; we only realize our new changes when it’s too late. It’s not transformation so much as quiet erosion, and that’s what softens the inevitable blow.
Still, there’s that faint, persistent ache that comes knowing each version of myself is temporary. That this very moment, even this sentence, is already in the process of leaving me.
But even as the leaves mottle, the days collapse into themselves, and my hair inevitably turns brittle in the shower’s silver gleam, there is still something bright and lovely in simply being here, awake and uncertain, yet alive with the weight of it all.
“Yes, Lord, I come to you today pleading for all of the aches of age, all of the permanent and immovable damage you have to offer.
Yes, there are moments I have spent and will continue to spend in a mirror, massaging products onto my skin and slowly washing them off, if not to delay the very things I am now welcoming, at least to make them as luminous as possible.
Do not be fooled by the weapons I refuse to lay down.
I come to you today with gratitude in knowing the fight cannot be won.
Let the hair turn its drab colors and, perhaps, slowly begin to depart down the drain.”
- Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year
Thansi Garikipati is a freshman from Edmond, Okla., studying Biophysics.
