THE GRADUATE

Last Saturday Something Changed

i. You finally feel an understanding of home. Life feels like dreams. I’d been lonely so long and always dreamt of people. People there who cared, people in my life who loved me, whose faces I recognized. Community. This is longest I’ve lived in the same place and went to the same school in my life, my childhood scattered with new beginnings and adjustments, never quite feeling safe and certain. Last month I got a boyfriend for the first time in my life, at the slightly embarrassing age of twenty two. But it’s completely perfect for now because we had the same tumor and brain surgery. His a year after mine, but only three days apart. He was twenty and I seventeen. He has none now and I one. Tiny, but deep in my brain. I have found a home in others for the first time in my life, and I have to leave it. For France. Maybe that’s the point. You can’t, or shouldn’t, make a home in others. Your only home can be the world and yourself. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love others, but you can’t rely on them to shape and decide your life. You have to be a lone agent. But this doesn’t satisfy me, a bit too objectivist for my liking. Maybe the opposite is true, maybe you should prioritize people and relationships above all? This is hard. It’s probably a mix of the two but that feels like a cop out. Nuance is a cheat.

ii. I feel good happy and loved, like my present and immediate future are so sweet that I’m going to be sick. I know by October I will be all alone in the south of France barely making a living wage. Which I’m grateful for, but for some reason I have to mourn preemptively. Since I was a child, I have always had to imagine and hypothesize and experience the future internally to feel prepared to deal with reality. Maybe you call that anxiety. Perhaps if I suffer now, I’ll feel a little more prepared to deal with larger amounts of suffering of times in stress (moving to a new country, starting a new job, French bureaucracy while going through a breakup and not having my friends + time zone difference). Futile attempts to understand the future. If I can anticipate my someday emotions, maybe they won’t be so painful then. I’ll just stay at a constant level of sadness. Half mourning the moment, half appreciative.

iii. I wore a bikini to graduation under my robe because it was horribly hot. Unfortunately at security the guards were telling us, “robes must be unzipped”. So I unzipped my robe sheepishly and as soon as a female security guard caught glimpse of my exposed abdomen, she shook her head and said “No.”, leading me over to the corner. I tried to explain myself – I didn’t want to overheat! I was going to keep it zipped! But another lady came over and started on, “No. Uh-uh. This is not going to work. You need to change.” And I just felt odd standing there in my bikini with only the robe on, but I guess that was my choice. I didn’t anticipate that you’d “have to wear clothes to graduation”. What has the world come to? Then an older man, who I assumed to be the big boss, walked over, took one look at me and said, “That’s fine.”, allowing me to go in. To my own detriment perhaps, because it was three hours in the blazing sun listening to speeches. Overall, the tone was, “It’s your guys’ job to fix the fucked up world you were handed.”