For Lack of a Better Goodbye: On College, Pandemic Graduations and Drunk Walks Home
By Faith Geiger
Sometime in the fall of 2019, I summoned a slew of the most nostalgia-invoking, gut-wrenching songs I could think of, threw them into a Spotify playlist I titled “graduation”, and cried to it an estimated average of once a week for the remainder of the year.
I cried for a lot of reasons—maybe because I had just spent an incredible night with my friends and felt time slipping past me too quickly; maybe because I tried to create a LinkedIn and got overwhelmed; maybe simply because I was drunk and “Rivers and Roads” came on—but mostly, I cried because I hate change, because I am terrified of it, and because, as excited as I was to finish college, celebrate the triumph with my friends, and step into the elusive adult world, the blank slate waiting for me there was as daunting as it was refreshing. I was perfectly comfortable with my current slate. It was crowded, smudged, and admittedly tainted with a few things I would rather erase, but it was familiar. I had no idea where to begin when it came to filling the new one. I didn’t know who I was going to be; I didn’t know what I was going to do; I didn’t know how I was going to say goodbye. What I really didn’t know at the time was that I wouldn’t have to say goodbye at all, because I wouldn’t even have the chance to.
I am notoriously melodramatic. If you’re looking for a practical, grounded perspective from someone who handles things gracefully, I will not be able to provide that for you. Most of the people who know me would probably agree that I’ve managed to turn nostalgia and sentimentality into a brand of sorts. This is all to say that I hate goodbyes, and I hate endings, and I take them both very seriously. I hate them so much that it turns to love. I prepare for them; I treat them like rituals. Everything has to be just right if it’s the last time, and goodbyes are the last chance to get everything perfect—to tell the moment to move a little to the left before you snap its picture, encase one glimmering memory in glass, and save it for future nostalgia.
College graduation was going to be the biggest, most important goodbye of my young life. And of course you know where I’m going with this: Reader, it was canceled, along with the greater part of my final semester of college.
I remember the day I gathered with a poetry class for the last time in my life. Actually, I remember almost every day I gathered with that class, because it was filled with some of my favorite classmates and taught by my favorite professor. I remember that one girl stopped to say goodbye to him and that I didn’t. I didn’t think that things could escalate to the degree that they were about to, or else I was ignoring the possibility because it was too hard to think about.
At the time I was sitting in that class, I was still planning on taking a spring break trip to New Orleans with my friends. Within the span of a few days, my school’s spring break would be extended to two weeks, we would cancel our trip, and, not long after that, in-person classes would be canceled indefinitely. I moved back into my mom’s house, gathered with my best friends exclusively over Zoom and FaceTime, and graduated on my couch, watching a slideshow of the English department and waiting for my face to pop up. As a graduation gift from my university, I received an envelope filled with confetti and a red plastic license plate frame. Unfortunately, I cannot drive, so you can imagine that this didn’t quite make up for everything.
I had already spent so much time listening to “Landslide” and “Wide Open Spaces” and preparing to say goodbye to college, and now it felt like I had to say goodbye to the entire world as I knew it, too. If ever I tried to think about the future, my brain would turn to mush. I felt like I needed to be planning, but how could I? How do you plan for the future when you don’t even know when the present will resume? Even now, while we slowly make our way out of the pandemic, I still find myself feeling this way sometimes.
But the past gets to me, too. All the things that became the past too quickly, that should’ve had at least a few more months to be the present. The mundaneness of it all: the corner seat of my afternoon lecture, the walk to Franklin Hall that my legs still know by muscle memory I’ll never need to use again, and the small talk between my classmates each morning. These things admittedly feel silly and unimportant compared to everything else the world has lost, but sometimes, the small bits feel easier to mourn.
I don’t really know how to write about college the way I would have before I knew I wouldn’t get the end of it, but it feels worth trying, which is why I’ve been working on this essay for over a year. It’s a difficult task; all the moments feel so big and so far away now that I can’t put them into words. All the memories I made and all the ones I had planned on making get jumbled in my head. It’s all just the sound of my friends’ laughter and shitty dorm food and sweaty hand-squeezes at parties, giggles behind bathroom doors, swipes of glitter on our cheeks.
Some moments you miss even while they’re happening. Some moments seem to have nostalgia built into them. But so many of the memories I look back on with the most fondness are the ones I didn’t even realize I would remember. The thing that’s really starting to scare me is forgetting.
So I’m trying to write this, not about the pandemic or isolation or the future or any of that, really, but about the small things, so I can try to make up a picture of the larger things. I guess I’m writing it the same way I’ve been trying to live my life for the past year: not ignoring what’s changed, but finding a way to move around it, to exist in it, to work with it. Nothing is the same, will not be the same, cannot feel the same. I can’t pretend it does or will or can. But I can work with what I do have.
*
One night back in the early days, when everything still seemed shiny and vast and the air felt perpetually charged with some sort of possibility, my friends and I ended up at the same place we nearly always did: watching a band play in a musty basement. What I remember about this night in particular is the way the older girl with the dark hair asked my friend and I how old we were, and when we answered honestly, said to us with the same sort of nurturing condescension with which I imagine we’d all speak to our younger selves: “God, Freshmen! You’re so young and bright-eyed! You still have hope for the world!”
What do I want to say to those girls who stood there, sipping warm PBR and hoping they didn’t look too lost? Young, bright-eyed, so hungry for the moment and desperate for boys in bands to love them? For anyone to love them? God, Freshmen! So much will happen to you. So many people will happen to you. By the time it’s over you will have to wonder if it even happened at all.
Soon the blurring would start. The moments bleeding into each other, all the versions of myself changing from one to the other so rapidly I can only distinguish them in retrospect. Time will do that to you, of course—transform you. But people will, too, and so will places. Like a cramped dorm room, a half-empty dining hall, a bench to cry on (every Friday, after class). There were so many pieces of myself I would lose and find again, so many people who would pass through me, not without shedding something on their way out. There were so many ways my heart would be broken, and it would be miraculous.
There are a lot of things I’d like to be able to warn my past self about. So many things she wouldn’t have to stumble through if she had just known what I know now. It seems that’s what life becomes: looking back at past versions of yourself and thinking, “You had no idea.” Realizing you still don’t.
But I think the stumbling may be the most important part. I think I am still stumbling. I think maybe I will never really master walking. When I really think about it, I know that I am still young. I am still bright-eyed. I still have hope for the world. But I am a little wiser. I know myself a little better. I have a little bit of a wider knowledge of English Literature, journalism ethics and, thanks to gen-ed requirements, something called astrobiology. I am a little better at pretending I know how to speak French, I have traveled to a few more countries, I have waded in a few more bodies of water. I am a little better equipped to handle heartache, and, perhaps most importantly, I have a few more friends who are able to help me through it all—who are willing to tie my hair up and rub my back in a bar bathroom, who will hold my hand when I need them to. I am also a tiny, tiny, tiny bit less afraid of the future, because it is happening, and I am living in it, and I survived the whole way here. And, also, I have a degree.
*
There is a video on my phone—one that is mostly mundane, but too precious to me to ever delete—in which I’ve captured part of a walk home from a party I don’t remember. A party that by now has blurred together with all the others. My friends are in front of me, we’re weaving through a parking garage, and I’m inebriated and rambling about how I think it’s about to rain. “I don’t know why I’m documenting this,” I tell my phone. “I was walking home with my friends and it felt special. Walks home always feel important. I want to remember the moment.” I laugh, lower my phone so my friends swipe out of view, and the video ends.
This is how I will always remember it felt to be young and fumbling through the tail end of adolescence: the glow of it all, the laughter echoing through the parking garage, the promise of rain. My friends leading the way.
I won’t lie and say that I have fully accepted the fact that my college experience ended the way that it did, but I have found ways to be grateful for the moments I did get. For the fact that we did it together, that the mess of it all was one more thing we were able to hold each others’ hands through. I’ve realized that I probably won’t ever get my perfect goodbye, but I’ve also realized that a perfect goodbye hardly even exists, anyway. What I do have is a collection of imperfect moments that almost—almost—make up for it.
And, really (if you’ll allow me one last metaphor), what is the final year of college if not the walk home from one long, splendid, exhausting party? And what a tremendous, winding walk home we had. ◆