Eulogy for College Days

Eulogy for College Days

You showed me the awesome and terrible limits of the human body. The all-nighter, followed by the all-dayer, followed by two hours of semipointless meetings with other people thinking, “This is semi-pointless.” You taught me to sleep through anything, even the party bumping inches away from my head, barely muffled by the tissue-paper-thin threshold called a wall. You taught me to survive for weeks on espresso-based beverages and the soup they serve at the student union.

You revealed to me the frightening depths of human intellect. You taught me how to skim an entire novel in eighteenth-century Spanish in under an hour; how to craft a thesis during a dance break in the library bathroom; how to write endless pages; how to write more endless pages and revise the endless pages previously written and subsequently destroyed by a professor. And during finals week, when the computer lab smells like body odor and desperation, you taught me that the printer will never cease to fail. But no matter; I ran out of printing funds several months ago.

You left me questions that might never be answered. Why do people answer their cell phones in the library and have long conversations at unreasonable decibel levels? Why do the lane lines in the pool randomly unleash themselves from the wall, entangling innocent lap swimmers? Why are Granville winters eternal, grey, and Whit’s-less?

Fear not, college days. You shall have eternal life in my monthly student loan bills, in my overusage of words such as “hegemonic” and “concomitant” and “neoliberalism,” as my digestive system realigns itself after four years of dining hall food. You shall live on.

Published November 2020
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