“It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” wrote Joan Didion. I marked this page with a sticky note and underlined and circled and believed this phrase until it sounded trite. Until the year it became harder to see the beginnings of things and frighteningly easier to see the ends. Until my semester of magical thinking.
I began college with the unfettered excitement one feels as they approach the cusp of independence and adulthood and the last sweet feelings of freshmanship.
August 16th: my assigned move-in day; August 25th: the first day of formal instruction
I can find these dates with ease on a calendar, read them to you, mark them with red, and cross them out with a black Sharpied “X”, but I still can’t tell you when college began. I can’t separate the pieces and tell you when high school became summer and Pittsburgh became Jackson or Berkeley and seventeen became eighteen even though I can coolly recite the dates June 4th and August 8th and convince you that they mean something. In truth, I stumbled in delirium through the last months of high school, through a thin, dry summer, and through my first semester of college, only conscious of the harsh and unavoidable and sobering ends.
It was easy to see the end of high school: a temperate June day, an expensive white dress, a lingering cloud of cigar smoke and Dior perfume and reminiscence. There were bouquets and photo-ops and speeches crumpled into pockets and acknowledgements of lasts. It’s easy still to hold the delicate leather diploma in my hands and feel that day’s weight of realization that one might never be in this place again.
It was similarly easy to see the end of Pittsburgh: a pristine white real-estate sign, a trailer full of overfilled cardboard boxes, an order of Chinese noodles at a table for four, and a skyline in a rearview mirror.
I suppose these were ends I prepared for, or at the very least expected. I was, after all, the one who prepared the graduation remarks and sealed the moving boxes and ordered the Lo Mein and packed the car. With both sorrow and celebration I was ushering these moments past and trying not to blink too hard.
But at some point there came an onslaught of endings I did not prepare for. Endings that were not penciled into my calendar ahead of time. Endings that did not elicit parties in backyards or cordial hugs or champagne bottles. The harsh ending of a (first) love, of which I could point to no clear beginning. The ending of a childhood spent in the bucolic hills of Pennsylvania. Here began the months when every event felt like a violent reminder of something I could no longer have. As I look back now, I can hardly tell you of any clear beginnings because I was only able to measure them relative to other ends.
Naturally some were worse than others, but in late September came the one that defined my semester of magical thinking.
Life changes in the instant … the ordinary instant.
Life changes on a Monday morning after calculus discussion when one gets a call that marks the end of adolescence altogether.
I suppose there is a bold assumption we all make at eighteen when we leave our hometowns for the first time: that the world we leave behind will wait for us, unchanged. We leave our brick homes and our favorite ice cream shops and our secret backroads knowing that when we return, they will be right where we left them. It’s the notion that the universe will protect everything we entrust it with, that what has been will continue to be, that memory is enough to preserve things as they are. I see now how foolish this is, because the universe did a terrible job at protecting what I gave it and suddenly nothing in my hometown was as I left it six months ago.
The week I learned of her death, it rained non-stop in Berkeley. The clouds didn’t break for days and everything was dulled by the overcast sky and the entire bay was hidden by the thick shroud of fog that settled into every crevice of the city. I didn’t go to class for days. I could not sleep, and I did not want to wake up. I could do no more than sit in bed and watch the raindrops gather into puddles and spill over the ledge of my windowsill over and over. I tried to write but no words could explain a single thing I felt. There were weeks on end where all I could think was, “I want to go home,” as I was lying in my own bed. I wanted to go home, but I couldn’t even buy a plane ticket.
There is a plague of thoughts and feelings one encounters at the death of a close friend which becomes unthinkably harder to deal with at eighteen than it would be at forty-seven or eighty-nine. It changes you physically—the heaviness of your limbs, the hollowness of your chest, the pain in your throat that will not go away no matter how many times you swallow. It’s a change I can recognize in strangers and friends and one that warrants a mutual nod, a quick, silent acknowledgement of the grief that lives within us. The grief that emerges from all the words we’ll never be able to speak, the laughs we’ll never again hear, and all the love with nowhere left to go.
And then it is a week later. A month later. It is only foggy some days and the sidewalks are dry.
And then it is a Wednesday and I am shuffling a deck of cards on my dorm floor, begging for a lucky ace to appear at the top of the pile because all I have left is delusional superstition. I am looking at a person I can’t recognize in the mirror and I am watching the cake before me fill with candles that I can’t blow out. My nose is bleeding. My heart is hurting and they can’t read the EKG. The medicine just makes me depressed. I eat because I know I’m supposed to. I watch my pens collect dust. I look out at the intersection below my window and count the cars that drive by until, at some point in the night, the light stops alternating between green and red and flashes yellow instead. At some point, even the stoplight gives up. It becomes so easy to see the ends that I forget there are beginnings.
