Truth & Sentiment
They say that the speed at which you experience life accelerates as you grow older, and they are right. The minutes, the hours, the days, the months fly by. I turn 25 tomorrow, and much of my adult life has indeed been a blur. I am lucky I have a phone with a camera and like to use it. Yet, sometimes, when I am simply walking across campus, or listening to a song, or doing anything that seems to trigger a sense of deja vu, I experience such evocative, Proustian moments that I wonder about the nature of time and memory. Last night, with two tests and numerous assignments looming, and while the clock ticks towards 1 AM, I am as animated as ever. I play the first-ever voice memo made on my phone, a recording from West Beach in downtown Santa Barbara, California. A man plays the accordion, backed by an instrumental track. It is there, surrounded by throngs of tourists, that my memories of college truly begin.
Certainly, there are preceding moments too. I am in the ASR classroom with Will, watching the late spring light catch my dandruff as I shake my unwashed hair, talking about the possibility of attending Cal Poly SLO together, when he tells me his parents are getting divorced. And later that summer, there is the lunch I share with his late father, who, on my mother’s good intentions, insists on my attending college. But, again, it is there, as my mother and I walk down the Santa Barbara pier, and I snap photos of the fishermen overhanging the railing and of her smiling face, that I begin to feel that college is not for me. Despite the golden light and pretty people, I am hesitant to return in the fall. I attend anyway. Like most things in life, it is good, and it is bad. I remember both. I remember playing pickup football on the beach that first week with other freshmen I would rarely see again. I remember the early mornings on the Lagoon and sharing breakfast with Megan afterward. I remember telling Megan that my grandfather had died. I remember crying. I remember lots of crying. I remember speaking to my professor about my misgivings and her offer to chat on the phone after class one day. And later that evening, I remember standing outside my dorm, looking towards the Channel Islands as the sky grew purple, and beginning to sob. I remember COVID canceling our winter quarter finals and heading home. I remember playing spike ball with my friends at Green Lake and telling them that I had dropped out. I didn’t put it that way. I remember telling them I was withdrawing.
There are intervening months, or even short years, that I don’t remember so well. Days or weeks where I am totally clueless and lost. Weeks where I take no pictures, unremarkable weeks that go unremembered. There are moments of course that jump from that time too: breaking my arm, riding the tricycle I rented for a week after doing so, slack lining or skateboarding before it fully healed. I can remember being asked if I needed money while pulled over at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere Wyoming on my way to Colorado. I can remember walking into Sage with my COVID mask still on. Mostly I remember the magnificent sunsets and the simultaneous freedom and embarrassment of living out of my car. Although I do not remember it well, I am confident that throughout it all, school remained on my mind. After I tell them about dropping out and my journey to the seat in the back of the raft, I remember the guests wishing me luck after our trips. They seemed to sense, long before I did, that I might need it. The return to school at SBCC was a questionable choice at best, and a poor one at worst. I can remember seeing Gracie in LA before driving up the 101 to Isla Vista and my then girlfriend. I have some faint memories of the classes, but stronger ones of the bike rides, the almost infinite wheelie attempts (and successes!), the digging in the dirt, the attempting to have fun, the trying to fit in with Megan’s friends. I remember, more distinctly than maybe anything from those six months, walking on the second floor of UCSB’s Davidson Library with Megan and telling her how much I hated this environment. I remember her telling me that maybe it wasn’t for me. I remember not knowing what that meant. I still don’t. When May and June rolled around, and the grasses grew as tall as me, the commencement ceremonies began. I watched as Kyle’s name was called on ASU’s livestream and as Megan’s was called in person on the commencement green. When it was time for me to leave, I remember taking one last picture of Sherwin in his graduation regalia and him laughing at me, asking what for. The feeling that I would not return anytime soon, if at all, seemed too heavy to tell him. I just laughed back.
Despite stopping to see John and Cam walk across their stage in Knight Arena, the drive home was a lonely one. A vast majority, it seemed, of the people I had graduated high school with or entered UCSB with had gone on to graduate again, and despite all the kind people telling me, “Oh, you’re not that far behind” or, “You have time,” it did not feel that way in the slightest. Regardless of how anybody else saw it, what I saw was many of my friends coming home with Bachelor’s degrees and promptly leaving for Europe. I came home with a set of winter tires hoping my Dad might give me a job, and slowly watched my mental health slide and my relationship with Megan fall apart. (I will always remember the scent of the flowers in the center median of I5 as my parents and I drove south to UCSB to drop me off for the first time, but when I smell them now, they are nearly cloying.)
The depression that comes shortly after my return home is like a rising tide. Slow and steady and unstoppable and affecting my whole world. I work for my father, I visit Will in Mallorca. I am as cold as I have ever been in Paris. When I apply to Western, I cry about retaking algebra classes in college after learning that my AP test scores would not transfer. That fall, I cry a lot. I cry so hard one evening my nose begins to bleed, and my father comes up from the office downstairs. When I am back to visit occasionally, I see that the blood stains remain on my bedroom carpet. Being put back in touch with Sadie is the lifeboat I did not know I needed. We exchange letters, and when she is home for Christmas, we kiss and then go to the Washington coast for a night and then begin to date. It all happens very quickly. It all feels as it should.
When the new year begins, I return to college. I arrive in Bellingham and at Western and am greeted with cold and rain and a free room with a floor covered in dirty socks. I don’t clean them up. The classes are harder than I remember and the weather worse. I try to run and lift and be happy. I am successful in only the first two. I am introduced to my psychiatrist and a new therapist and new drugs, and sometimes it all seems to work, and most of the time it seems to not. That summer I visit Sadie in Minneapolis and take a chemistry class. When the next school year arrives, I move in with Blake. The days grow shorter once again, but that winter I bring my skis and use them. There are brief, enlightened moments of happiness and longer ones of deep, grueling sadness. Crying, I bang my head against the shower wall, and late one night after an intramural game, I decide I’d no longer like to feel like losing all the time. I walk along the bridge as a drizzle begins and finally, against what most of my terrible master of a mind desires, call 988. I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know what to say. They are helpful anyway. When my sister visits later that week, she and Blake help check me into the emergency room. They take my belt and shoelaces and make a week feel like a month by not allowing me outside. Something happens in that mental hospital that I still fail to put words to, but it is something immensely positive. When I leave, I catch up on physics and make stickers for my friends. I move Sadie out of her apartment in Minneapolis and drive back with her through the Badlands and Yellowstone and the ancient floodplains of eastern Washington. It all seems to go easier after that. I play in the snow, wait for the sun to come back out, and when it does, I play on the beach. I play with my friends. I play with Sadie. I take pictures of them all. My camera roll grows. Fewer unremarkable weeks go unremembered. When I get the job in Idaho working for the Forest Service, it feels like the culmination of effort and struggle from those moments with my mother on West Beach in Santa Barbara to now. It feels like, in some sense, it was all worth it. Determining whether that is true or not remains pointless to me; sometimes, for better or for worse, the truth takes a back seat to sentiment.