Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

She had learned that unasked questions were more dangerous than unanswered ones.

Perhaps this was the purpose of funeral ceremonies, to signal to those minds numbed by grief that this was for real.

Massachusetts. But still, she thought, she should have felt the earth shift or the sky crack, at the very least a tiny sting or snap or click, even a hiccup, some signal that he had died, that she had lost someone irreplaceable.

Tragedy taints a person, and no one wants to touch that sadness, just in case it spreads.

Because once you’re diagnosed with a mental illness, you don’t get a say—she

Do we all pick only the best snapshots to remember in our mental scrapbooks and throw away the bad?

They were ghosts of Harvard. But where did that leave her? Trying to do homework in a haunted house.

Which, if you do it for religious reasons, makes you a martyr, a hero, a saint. If you do it as a mentally ill undergraduate, then people assume you’re pathetic, weak, or selfish.

She noticed how easy it was to edit someone’s past so that all the pieces of a person fit neatly together. Simple

Melancholia, loneliness, a rather conflicted relationship to our own identity.

“Absolutely. But I think your academic interest in the topic, despite or because of your history, is perfectly natural and healthy. Many people are drawn to the subject of psychology in order to understand themselves or their family’s issues. I was.”

“Suicide is unfortunately common among college students, it’s not a problem exclusive to Harvard. Some studies show as much as twenty percent of undergrads consider it at some point during their college careers. It’s supposed to be a time when you’re about to embark on your adult life, but for many young people, that springboard looks more like a precipice.”

They say fate is written in the stars, but the irony is that stars don’t project the future, they reflect the past. If you think about it, every time you look at a star, you’re looking back in time. The North Star is four hundred thirty light-years away, so when you see it shining, the light hitting your eyes is already four hundred thirty years old.

You and I have both lost someone. I like to think they’re like the stars. Their light hasn’t gone out. Candlelight goes out. But something as bright as a star, or a soul, that light moves on.

Legacy is different from fate. I chose to inherit his legacy, and I’m choosing to carry it onward. Fate implies you have no control. I admit, choice can be a burden, it would be a load off to think the future’s already set. But I don’t believe anything is written in the stars. I want to write it myself.

They were the fallen leaves of society, skittering haphazardly across hallowed cobblestone streets like human detritus not yet blown away.

Cady used to wonder why potential life was held more sacred than that which existed, but now she knew. It is far easier and more pleasant to imagine happy endings, however farfetched, in all their vivid, rainbow colors than it is to face each day’s reality and let time and fortune do their worst. She

If we could all know our futures, how many of us would choose to see it through?

Cady sighed heavily. Life-tired. She was exactly that.

Robert Oppenheimer?

They were ghosts, after all, and happy endings don’t haunt anyone.

The stories we tell ourselves have such power, and yet they can be mistaken, cherry-picked, or otherwise fictitious.

Now she understood that we must love people whom we cannot control, in fact, we are lucky to love and be loved by people we cannot control. If we could control the person, love wouldn’t be a gift. This was the uncertainty of life, and of death. It was what made life beautiful and terrifying at once. It was the state of grace.

But home didn’t mean a perfect place with only good memories, it meant a place where you grew up.