Gradually Graduating

So tonight I was walking home right around that mysterious moment when days switch, lost in fog. For the past couple weeks, I've been processing that I'm about to graduate, and that I'm getting married, and that I'll be moving and starting a new job and…life. As a result, I've been mulling over my four years here, and who I've been throughout it all. Fog is always super special; my first kiss was in fog, and I think it makes the world magical. Anyway……as I was walking back, I passed a bridge, a bridge I crossed that day, that wretched, beautiful, ending beginning day. And the year between that day and the summer after came flooding back; agony, hopelessness, devastation.

And then I had this moment where I realized I was gazing straight at my younger self of three years ago, standing on that bridge, a hundred yards away. In my memory, my younger self stared back at me, broken, aching, destroyed too thoroughly for words, begging her future for some scrap of hope. And I smiled at her warmly and said, "Take strength, little one, all will be ok; you will find meaning once again. You will discover that you are a human, and when you soon begin asking yourself, 'Why prolong my existence?', you will, after many vast failures, find an answer. You will embrace the purpose that is intrinsic to humankind and know beyond doubt that it's perfectly ok to be that…human…and nothing less and nothing more. Your pain is overwhelming at this moment, but at the end lies great reward, when you get to spend the rest of your life discovering what humanity truly entails."

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I'm at the last few pages of the Olivet book; that point where you know everything has to get wrapped up somehow, and quick, even if the author still has a little trick or two left to spring. Well, here's my trick: somehow in the midst of this weird time loop — something healed. It was as though I became my own redeemer, validating familiar old pain. Is that sacrilege even possible? Can dopamine bathe the miserable neurons of deeply painful memories and soothe them, making them sweeter for the contrast?


Enh, maybe it was just the fog.

Packing Up

The school year is wrapping up, which means it's time to do what I've done at least once a year, every year, for the past seven years: pack.

I really like packing. Packing is when I get to cull through my treasures, soaking in memories, smiling or puzzling over some little scrap that tugs at my mental libraries. I get to rewrite my history, occasionally tossing things which have lost significance, but always replacing them with a few new things I've collected. Some people have scrapbooks. I have an assortment of papers and odd objects that anyone else would put in a junk yard.

I came across my old study Bible tonight. It was given to me in middle school at a private international academy. I flipped through it with a certain fondness, noting verses I had highlighted or memorized. I smiled at the puzzled questions I'd written beside verses in Genesis. It's at least 7 lbs and the size of a textbook, but I can't bring myself to part with it.