I graduated from college recently, and it felt anticlimactic - a moment that I had been waiting for a long time to happen finished in a few short days.
During the final days I felt like I was dividing the time I had left into tinier and tinier pieces. Kind of like mitosis, or binary search1, I started seeing weeks into days into half days and hours and minutes. Trying to see in each subdivision how many things I could cram while still an undergrad. It was never a goodbye, but a see you later, and sure enough I’d seem them again maybe late at night maybe in the early morning maybe while walking to commencement. It turns out the “some infinities are bigger than other infinites” argument in the fault in our stars is wrong and in reality the space between different pairs of numbers is all the same. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad when leaving campus, I had said so many preemptive goodbyes to only see people again that a part of me got stuck in the infinity between the numbers. There was still time, there will always be time, and it’s never running out.
A small part of me, maybe because it seemed like I was going to be a student forever, thought that time was like a horizontal field and I was only choosing to go forward2. I could go back if I wanted to, undo the mistakes I had, change the course of action that was my future. There’s a show about that, where this college student is stuck in an endless time loop and joins different clubs trying to see if he could make his college life perfect, and falls short each time. In the end, the reality is the choices he made didn’t matter, the real catalyst for change was altering his attitude at the end.
I can’t split time any further and I can’t go back either but regardless I’m hopeful the compass that was shaped carries me into gentler waters. I’ll see ya’ll again and happy grad (even if you haven’t congratulations on the end of may)!!
pic cred: https://twitter.com/whotfisjovana/status/1659316589366214657
notes:
I am in Japan/Korea for the first time ever :O and then visiting sf/van real quick
idk why my posts sound kind of serious I think writing more than a paragraph just causes it to be that way I blame to all the kings men cuz now I really like long metaphors
I want to create more!!!! hmu if you wanna make art tgt
yeah i took oop and data structures xD
this is a metaphor I don’t actually believe in time travel :,D
omg connie i literally have a draft in my substack called on liminal spaces too LMAOOO IF I post it kno i didnt copy but rather i feel this so hard