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Everyone jokes that going to Jefferson prepares you for the total college experience: you learn to work, and you learn to drink. Two years ago the New York Times ranked us among the top ten booziest public schools in Connecticut. It’s not like there’s anything else to do around here, though. We’ve got malls and basement parties. That’s it. Let’s face it: that’s how most of the country is. My dad always said that they should take down the Statue of Liberty and put up a big strip mall instead, or those golden McDonald’s arches. He said at least that way people would know what to expect.
Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. It’s a good feeling, though: the feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.
I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction.
Things change after you die, though—I guess because dying is about the loneliest thing you can do.
I suppose that’s the secret, if you’re ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up.
It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It’s never occurred to me before; I’ve never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.
So many things become beautiful when you really look.
How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?
No matter how close he’s standing, it isn’t close enough.
I’m not exactly an expert, but I’m guessing it’s like that for most things in life—the last kiss, the last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don’t know. But I think that’s a good thing, really, because if you did know it would be almost impossible to let go. When you do know, it’s like being asked to step off the edge of a cliff: all you want to do is get down on your hands and knees and kiss the solid ground, smell it, hold on to it. I guess that’s what
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Most of the time—99 percent of the time—you just don’t know how and why the threads are looped together, and that’s okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely—by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute—you get the chance to do the right thing.
I wander through the halls and the campus, thinking how strange it is that you can live your whole life in one place and never really look at it.
maybe we all feel patched and stitched together and not quite right.
That’s what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you’re supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you’d rather stay in bed and do nothing. The truth is this: it doesn’t take any skill to almost-die, or to almost-live, either.
I guess what they say is true: it’s the little things that matter.
I guess that’s kind of how love works: it changes how you see things. It changes what other people look like to you.
