It gets harder with every year,
sophomore, junior, then senior. One of the few aspects of college life that is
more difficult to witness yet more beautiful with every year. The freshmen pour
in. Eclectic fashion, astounding energy, the hope of millions channeled inside
each individual one, the kind of vigor that shines like the rising sun in mid-July,
stunning expectation, anxious physicality, anticipation long forgotten and the
kind of fear that you only recognize at the beginning of each Fall semester. It’s
that fear that reminds you of how dull your light now is in comparison to back
when you were them. The kind of fear
that is just waiting to be opened up and operated on, changed, re-arranged, unlearned,
created and re-created. The kind of fear you miss knowing as your own intimate
confidant. You allow envy to linger and make your best effort at rekindling
memories from your distant observations. You delight in a vulnerability that
seems to be jumping up and down, dancing and banging on the doors of downtown
Richmond, on the edge of its seat waiting for the call of the beginning of the
rest of their lives. To know the unknown and to finally be known for what it
is. College! The place they escaped to under the presumption that this was the
place to bring yourself, be yourself, become yourself. The place where they
will acquire ambitions, beliefs, experiences, friends and knowledge that will surreptitiously
give the finger to everything at home they came to escape. The immersion of
varying opinions and things known to them as taboo will come to create a
rebellious persona that can only be enacted through the bonded result of this
pledge made with their fellow freshman to be new and curious. They travel in
packs and can be identified as coy, brave in a quest to prove memorable,
obnoxious, or important. They are innocent seekers.
Many come with significant others. You
look on with concern and a thriving joy inside yourself than no amount of
cynicism could thieve from you. Together they possess a rare fragility displaying
that passionate, all consuming, out of their minds, first time, I would eat my peanut
butter and marshmallow sandwich off the bottom of his/her shoe 3 days walked on
and savor it, run to the ends of the earth to make my point to finally give in
just to feel all of it at one time, forgo all plans, hopes, dreams in the name
of Jimmy/Susie kind of enamored devotion. They were dropped off by mom and dad
and overnight became the people they are becoming. Naturally they conclude to make it eternal.
Within this pact they promise to be together forever. They sit on the
quad/Monroe Park on a towel and share Pizza Hut and Shafer soft serve.
You leave for your 9 a.m. wearing smeared makeup reeking of jaded annoyance that sums up all thoughts of your disappointment
in Honey Boo Boo’s repugnant idea of spaghetti and your high electricity bill. You
walk past the dorms; 8:50 a.m. He sits outside of Brandt and waits for her with
big gleaming eyes begging for approval with Starbucks in hand and endearment in
his heart. You would bet a million bucks that this kid would sit there for
another 30 minutes waiting, that he would pick up the three morsels of the
muffin she drops in class and dust them off if she asked him to. You want to
tell them to suck it dry. You just want to walk right up to these two people
that you technically know nothing about and say, hey guys, please, give it all you got because
even when it does come down you just have to be able to say you gave it all you
had. To be able to say that you wanted the last sip of milkshake and you let
them have it at the prayer of a dirty, unexpected make out session mid-way through statistics in the window of her 15 minutes between classes up against that
restaurant window filled with twenty on-lookers in the Fan with reckless
abandonment.
You concede to yourself that they
fight as if the fire of 6,000 suns is upon them and they’ve been told that the
last mouth releasing a word is the one that won’t burn to death. Slowly but surely you observe
their internal struggle for freedom come to challenge what they once knew as
the most unbreakable alliance mankind had ever seen. You watch expectantly as
they give the most dramatic, wholehearted portrayal of a country trying to
overrule their struggle, oppression, and progression with the Constitution of their original
pact. They remain products of the America today that knows nothing of a
Constitution, little of who they are at age 17 and even less about commitment. Months
later, they disappear. You know they still come to class but they aren’t
together and he certainly isn’t waiting in the morning outside of Brandt. It is
as if their presence ceases to take up space. Occasionally you glance around to
find them, respectably singular beings. They are always dressed quite
differently than you remember, a different demeanor, maybe hair color, way
about who they now are.
Love like that is something that
makes an appearance with the spectacular likelihood of a perfectly spaced, free
parking spot in downtown Richmond or guessing the exact weight of your Sweet
Frog cup. It transcends into other’s lives and tells the world that reveries
are not to be martyred but lived. It shows us all that in placing your being
within another you deceive your worth and knowingly ingrain in your destiny a
counterfeit map. Love like that impels others to believe in the union of two people when
they don’t believe in themselves. It knows no free man and vacuums up the
aimlessly roaming dreamers to make captive. It is cruel and kind, wishful and
selfish, silly and original in a world where the word in its intended form has
become extinct. We know it to be fleeting and relentless with the fury of a breaching
stage 4 hurricane. Love like this gives birth to a hate stronger than we have
or will ever know. You can only hate as much as you have ever loved. This piece of life's pie is injected with an expiration date proceeding with purpose and a
poison that’ll keep you down and out for much longer than a few days. Whilst wading
in the loathing of the one you once called yours, evolution’s light creeps into
your window sill. The light gives growth to the hate so thoroughly harvested
sprouting maturity. The mind becomes entwined with the rest of humanity’s. We begin
a lifelong courtship with those around us. Our imaginations are bigger and broader, but not with creativity, but realizations of pain so many carry. Empathy overwhelms us.
One can find love without ever
having known this specific flavor of it. Most don’t but all things are possible.
We give ourselves over into another’s identity hoping theirs be strong enough
to allot meaning to ours. One of two ways it ends. Either so weak both break or
one so strong that it overcomes the other through consumption in pursuit of
addiction to the power. In this lesson, we learn that real love is not a
tug of war between wills but a generous offering, equal efforts volunteered
toward succumbing, subduing, or extending your will to meet your counterpart.
What if I said that romance is finding
that person that loves the you that you love the most. Well I would sort of be
channeling the sentiments of Carrie Bradshaw at the end of the Paris episode.
That one is my fave. But think about it, really. There’s something about the
thought of that… something fresh, something predestined to it, something that
makes your arm hair stand up. It takes your mind down that back road you grew
up riding in your best friend’s PT Loser (Cruiser) for forever and forever. It broadens
your perception of the world around you and pulls out a beckoning, earnest, happiness
from your very core, or maybe stark madness. I love the word madness. No matter
where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, you often think, no one sees
this one thing that’s inside me just waiting to be woken up. Why?
What if someone did and they fell
in love with that…. That would be everything, change everything. We spend our
whole lives walking down this path. It’s all our own. Many of us end up taking
side, alternative, sporadically chosen routes. We culminate experience and good
faith to truck on. The gps of our subconscious is screaming and warning us in
that British accent (no, that’s just mine) and from time to time we feel a little
tug from it. We become quiet enough internally to hear the buzzing for a moment.
It jolts us, get those endorphins going and we get off a little bit on the
thrill of taking the alternative route for the adventure. We do this in order
to explore, pick up and drop off the varied remnants of ourselves that we never
knew pieced together our identity. Eventually we come to our own peace, our
consensus. We hit a pinnacle; a death, abandonment, lost friendship, breakup, a
fork in the road and we make a decisive decision. The acceptance of the I am “insert
random culmination of unique traits” and I will not waver. I will seek and open
my mind to newfound knowledge, traits, and changes but this is the base of who
I was built to be.
Are you the silliest, quirkiest,
most optimistic person you know? Are you one of the most loving, or generous, or
unique people you know? Is doing little anonymous acts of kindness your thing?
Does no one give a compliment quite like you? If one of your friends wanted to
dare someone to jump up on the cafeteria table and announce in front of 200
students that it was them who pulled the fire alarm twice that morning, Would
you be the one most likely to do it? Are you ridiculously convicted in your
belief that the world would be a way better place if we all cuddled with a fluffy
Persian or stray behind the back of KFC every single day? Do you ask the best
questions ever? Are you secretly brilliant but everyone takes you for Kim
Kardashian? Are you a hidden comedian that no one will accept in response to
your immaculate GPA and endless leadership titles?
You’ll know it when you see it.
When you find those special details about yourself that you hold most beloved, demand that it
be loved with shameless, brazen courage and exuberance. It sounds simple enough
in theory. Why even talk about it? I all too often see young couples today try
to subdue or control some part of their significant other. Don’t be subdued,
but renewed to whoever you are. The right person will love about you what most
people don’t appreciate or perceive in the shallow confines of society. That
doesn’t mean that tomorrow I should wake up and decide that I am the biggest
genius man will ever know and I must win all arguments. These characteristics
must define love and be easily lendable to the harmony of a union. Who you are
isn’t a choice but a state. Before you can find your person, I think, you have
to know yourself. Once you know yourself you have to prioritize your character.
The person that falls effortlessly in love with it just as much as everything else
that comes with you….. that’s your person.
