ordinary morning grief
what i miss is everything
it’s you.
glasses, mid-length choppy red hair, twenty-two years old, two months from graduation. you’re sitting on a green office chair, a green best described as the color of ugly carpet. you inherited this chair from this room, from generations of students who have passed through your home. behind you, the frame crops the collage of posters lining the wall.
you see all this in lateral reflection, because it’s 8:30 am on a cold day in april and you’re deciding. today, like every day, you’re deciding who you are. this is always the most difficult part of the day.
first, what to wear: this is what you ponder as you sit in your green chair, gazing absentmindedly at the rectangular hanging mirror. spring here is always late and fleeting: today, it’s cloudy with a high of 47° F. you’re feeling unbothered today, somewhere between unperturbed and apathetic. you pull a black turtleneck over your head, your glasses pressing into your face because you forgot to take them off first. the other pieces fall into place. a pair of baggy high-waisted jeans, your first jeans that cost more than $50 that now comes a little too often into your wardrobe rotation. a men’s faux leather suede jacket, loose at the shoulders for an androgynous frame. a long silver necklace for balance, and run-hike converse to finish.
it’s you. countless possible combinations, collapsed into a single choice. a suede leather jacket or a long wool coat; oatmeal or toast; laundry or procrastination; café or library; which café or which library; what to do, how much, with whom.
this morning, like every morning, is a maze of countless possibilities. after tying your shoes, you head down from your third-floor room, stepping gingerly through creaky stairs into the basement kitchen. you open the overflowing freezer and toast your last two slices of bread. in the meantime, the laundry room that you passed by reminds you that you’re nearly out of socks. you run up the creaky stairs back to the third floor. your beige laundry bag is under your bed, nearly overflowing, stained with use in streaks of smoke. you sling it over your shoulder and waddle back downstairs; by the time you’ve paid your $2.15 to start your wash cycle, the toast is already cooling. you scrape some almond butter from a cold jar, drizzle a bit of maple syrup, sprinkle a spoonful of nutritional yeast. as you munch on your toast, you think about how you eat this meal a little too much, how it’s dry and you’re out of soymilk, how you should pick up some avocadoes on your next trader joe’s run. you check the time: it’s nearly 10, somehow, and you’ve taken too long again. you hastily make your way out the door, briefly pausing for your stained reflection. there’s a well-worn mirror at the entrance that says welcome but not goodbye, written a lifetime ago in purple marker.
it’s a cold cloudy day in april, but the sky is bright and the air is fresh. on branches that were barren just a month ago, cherry blossoms reach towards the sky in clouds of pink. as you turn the corner onto the harvard bridge, the cambridge skyline bursts into view. to your right, the big dome and the green building tower impressively behind a row of trees. to your left, dorm row and tang hall and the hyatt stretch into the distance, to where the BU bridge flanks in parallel. you’ll remember that you saw a sunrise there a lifetime ago, on your first day of MIT, sitting on a concrete platform below the railroad tracks. this is your hallow, your nexus where all worlds converge to and diverge from, your threshold that connects boston and cambridge, your house to your home, your worst and best and first and last days here. how many times have you crossed this bridge, now—five hundred? a thousand? and how many do you have left?
but you’re not thinking about any of this, now. it’s april, and you’re feeling the fresh breeze on your face, the warm brightness of a cold spring day, the wistfulness for blue skies, the illusory eternity of this place you call home. you stride briskly past anonymous pedestrians as cars and bikes zip by on the road. countless possibilities continue to await you at the end of the bridge: life alive or vester café, hayden or barker library, the Z-center, hmart, lectures to skip or attend. you start texting your friends—work together today? i’m skipping lecture. life alive? lunch? are you free for dinner?
you don’t know yet—that the most difficult part of the day is both short and ordinary. that this, too, is what you will miss. it’s april, a cold, cloudy, perfectly mundane morning on the harvard bridge. a place so sacred it is ordinary, a time so ordinary it becomes you, is you—calm, content, bright and tired, unforgettable, truly unforgettable—taking the future in strides, not knowing where the end is—
knowing only that nothing truly ends
