i can’t believe i’m graduating, we said, over coffee and maseeh dining and the harvard bridge. yeah, me neither.
then, on the morning of friday, may 31, 2024, we lined up by our majors and walked across a stage to circular orchestral music. we shook hands with important people. we took pictures with friends and our parents and each other
bye, we said over our bouquets. see you later.
and just like that, we graduated
(and i never saw her again)
the last few weeks have been a fever dream. before graduation i was trapped in a daze of graduation denial, and after graduation i went straight into a family mini-vacation to rhode island, to packing up all my belongings (of which i have too many), to a solo trip1 to tokyo. i have been graduating in stages—my last final last fall, my last class a few weeks ago, my commitment to grad school two months ago, my last day at MIT before my parents arrived, two separate graduation ceremonies, my last ice cream with my research mentor, my last coffee with A, moving out, flying out of Boston for good
so it doesn’t feel as though i graduated, at graduation. instead i feel like i am being gradually evicted from my home, my real home. i am a boiling frog and as much as i don’t want to face it, my friendships are the only thing tethering me now to MIT. i’m afraid more than anything of slowly drifting apart from these friends. i’m afraid of goodbyes, but i’m even more afraid of not being able to say goodbye
i know it’s strange, because my drifting apart from my friends is something i have agency over. my friends are always telling me this. maybe what i’m afraid of is the person i was before i came to MIT—someone too empty to cling onto good things
the last few weeks have been a fever dream. because i’ve graduated a year early, i’m currently in this superposition of feeling like a junior and a grad student and an unemployed joe, all at the same time. i can’t believe i’ve graduated, i can’t believe i’m fucking off to europe next year2, i can’t believe i got a tattoo yesterday, i can’t believe i’m sleeping in a capsule hotel, and i can’t believe i’m alone in tokyo right now, seven thousand miles away from home. i’ve gone and fucked off to tokyo because going straight back to san diego suburbia would break my heart. so i’m writing this from tokyo, at a beautiful little indonesian café that serves you coffee and pastries and a tiny pitcher of oat milk on a small wooden tray
it’s my third day of solo travel, and this already is my tenth café on this trip. i keep coming to cafés because beautiful cafés are my favorite solo destination, wherever i am in the world, and tokyo has an endless supply of them. cafés are wonderful because you can do anything at a café—a meal, dessert, getting caffeinated, reading, working, writing, thinking about my life seven thousand miles away from home, feeling homesick because i am thinking about my life all alone seven thousand miles away from home
i keep coming to cafés because they remind me of home. because the best thing to do at a café is to go on a date—a lunch date, a study date, a dessert date. this basque cheesecake is delicious, but how much more delicious would this be with a friend? traveling alone has allowed me to max out the number of things i can do, but i do not stop wondering about the joy that i cannot unlock alone. in the shadows there is this sinking feeling that the fact that i am taking my post-grad asia trip alone is evidence that i have not changed enough. i have never been on a trip with friends during college, but i could have made it happen. i could have clung onto my friends harder, i could have pulled myself out of this fever dream, i could have asked them for one more coffee—
what the fuck am i doing here?
you know, i’ve always wanted to go to tokyo, but now that i’m here i’m not really sure why. of course, my two thousand ish episodes of anime watched probably has played a part in this, as well as japan’s remarkable tourism marketing, with its beautiful cafés and beautiful food and beautiful toilets
don’t get me wrong—japan has been great. i’ve had many new things—good iced coffee, basque cheesecake, tempeh tempura, hand rolls, omurice, takoyaki from a street food stall, fresh fruit daifuku, kuzumochi, sorbet spheres that come in a package. part of me thinks that i am doing everything in order to make up for my last few weeks spent in a daze doing nothing. i’ve been walking so much that my calves started hurting yesterday, which has never happened to me before. i saw the real-life locations from your name and steins;gate and jujutsu kaisen; i’ve visited two separate pokemon centers, admired the menu of five different character-themed cafés, and walked through a ridiculous number of beautiful department stores. and it was truly ridiculous, the number of beautiful department stores that litter what feels like every other block. tokyo is such a paradise of consumerism that i feel a little sick, and i’m an american
indeed, tokyo has everything i’ve ever wanted out of a city: safety and cleanliness, dazzling cityscapes, charming cafés, cheap delicious food, incredibly efficient public transport, greenery meshed into apartments and sleek department stores. but deep down, i know that tokyo has nothing i really want at this moment. subways at 11 PM are filled with men in suits with briefcases and tired eyes. the skies are gray, and the smiles i take in each day are not from friends but from aggressively polite cashiers. i feel safe at night but not really safe: i am catcalled constantly, even during the day, in a language i don’t even understand
yesterday, i received my first tattoo: butterflies in tendrils of smoke, snaking from the back of my left arm to my upper back. i wake up day after day after five hours of sleep; in the capsule’s tiny wall mirror i look at the butterflies carved into my body and wonder if it is real, if i am real, if anything is real
a fever dream more than a dream: i am in tokyo, and i am doing everything but somehow still doing nothing. i wander the streets of harajuku in a daze, looking for the next thing to do. i’m remembering how i used to be before college, passing by the crawling minutes in daydreams. how i was attached to nothing, kept myself busy with nothing, looked forward to nothing except a dream of a distant future where i’d be finally anchored
the word i am looking for here is adrift. without MIT i fear i have lost the only place i have really belonged to, and i realized this too late. this graduation is nothing like high school graduation. i’m clinging onto the present instead of the sparkling future; i have sailed enough and i want to stay. but i have graduated, chosen to graduate. everyone tells me the future, too, will be full of dear friends and good things. i suppose i will be borne ceaselessly into a future where my home is a distant memory
i know—i will carve out a home wherever i go. well, maybe not tokyo, and definitely not san diego suburbia. but i will not stay in these places. but berlin, yes, and princeton, i hope. nothing will be like boston, and i know i’ll be okay with that someday. but for now, let me dream a little. let me cling onto my home for a little longer. let me look backwards, away from a future i don’t want to admit could shine brighter—for i am already drifting away
solo trip is not entirely accurate; my trip intersected with my friends’ trip for two days, but they were constrained by their summer employment
i’m going to germany for a year on a fulbright research fellowship