Desperately grasping for the last days of my college experience, I have begun to write down specific scenes from my life on campus. I do not know why I chose the scenes that I do every day, or how I always manage to write down pages upon pages about the mundane–but I have found a silent beauty in my days now, looking for parts of my life that could become a romanticized description in my journal, scribbled down in a notebook every night.
I have always been intrigued by lives past. When I hear of how old a building on my campus–the University of Colorado Boulder–is, I can’t help but imagine who walked on the steps before me. Did girls in the seventies discuss women’s lib where I now study for my French exam? How many hearts had fallen in love on the quad I walk past every day? How many have been broken? Was the absence of young men after World War One noticed on the path by Folsom Field, the busiest spot on campus? World War Two?
In two months, come graduation day, I will be a part of the forgotten history of my campus, too. I can only hope someone might read this, whether it be tomorrow or next year or in ten years, and see how the American student on an American campus lived in 2024. And for those who live in the same place at the same time as me, I can only hope they find a sliver of their lives in the recollections of mine.
Tuesday, February 27th, 2024
I am walking home from my evening ceramics class, on a sidewalk next to one of the busiest roads in Boulder.
It’s cold–I was bold, didn’t check the weather app, and went without a jacket–so I fold my sweatered arms over my chest. I am not sure if I should blame the weather switch–it was warm enough for shorts this morning–on global warming or not. No one is really sure these days. I can’t remember if the weather was always this extreme in the early springtime or if my childhood is embellishing memories of a climate that wasn’t ruined beyond repair.
My AirPods are dead, and my sister didn’t pick up the phone. So I spend my walk home taking some time to text my friends about graduation dresses and the price of our graduation robes, but mostly I just look down at my boots and at the dark shadow of the Flatirons against the night sky. It’s not dark enough for stars yet, though, and you can still make out the jagged lines of rock on the mountains that surround my town.
The Flatirons created a community out of the students at CU Boulder. No matter who you are at my school–stoner or sorority girl, skier or academic, or all four–you can look up at the mountains anywhere on campus and feel a little bit better. They’re for all of us, and none of us at the same time–you cannot own a mountain and anyway: the reminder at the end of every email many professors send makes sure we’re aware the campus is on stolen land. But the Flatirons do create a community. If there’s one thing you can make conversation about with anyone on campus, it’s the Flatirons. That they look nice today, or that you prefer them dusted with snow, or did you hear about the bobcat that was spotted by that trailhead? The crush from class, the girl I hate from last year, my best friend–they all look up at the same mountains every morning. I am going to miss them.
Thursday, February 29th, 2024
I’m sitting on a bench in front of Norlin library, eating a granola bar. My roommate and I got into an argument over text, but it’s now resolved as a miscommunication, so I feel better. Anyone our age will tell you that if there’s one thing to avoid, it’s fighting over text. I should have learned my lesson by now.
It snowed yesterday, but today it’s sunny and warm. Well, maybe just sunny. It’s one of those Colorado days when the sun is so strong, the top of your head and the back of your neck are hot, but the rest of your body feels the chill of the actual air. The snow has melted, and the quad is bustling, but no one is on the grass, so I assume the ground is still damp from yesterday’s snow.
When the grass is dry, there are people littered all over the quad–reading or listening to music or doing homework, but laying down, in spots so random it’s as if a giant hand picked up all of these people and rolled them onto the warm grass like they were throwing dice in a poker game.
On the way to this bench, I passed a “Buffs for Palestine” protest meeting advertisement. On the way home, I’ll pass a “Buffs for Israel” table in the memorial center. While I think it’s good that universities allow students to voice their opinions on campus, I can’t help but have a broken heart over the image in my mind of a student 20 years before me, passing by very, very similar tables.
Tuesday, March 5th, 2024
I’m walking into the University Memorial Center to find my roommate before we go to our ceramics class.
I approach the table she’s sitting at, and slide in next to her. She’s eating the snack she packed this morning–cheese and crackers and salami and carrots. I try a cracker–a wasabi rice cracker–and I know I’ll have to limit myself from eating more of her snack, they’re that good. They crack under my teeth and the flavored powder rests on my fingers, so I lick it off while we talk.
She throws me a pack of fruit snacks, and we laugh after I open it, because it’s all red fruit snacks even though statistically that should not be the case. It’s just my luck because I’m allergic to red dye 40, and I will have a rash on my neck tomorrow because of these fruit snacks.
I pop them in my mouth anyway as she tells me about her day. We talk about her group project and the magazine we run together and the cute boys who walk past us. We talk about how expensive buying a sandwich on campus has become, and then we talk about Joe Biden and what we want to work on in ceramics today.
On the walk to ceramics, she began to do a stupid little dance and hit herself in the head with her water bottle and I laughed so hard and loud I’m sure it echoed across the campus square, to the mountains, and back.
While a couple of excerpts out of many, I chose these because they should be the most boring. I could have decided to publish my story about getting locked out of the house for a night, or any of my traveling adventures, or even about the personal drama I’ve experienced.
But these stories are the most at risk of being lost, of being washed out of collective campus thought–and my own–come my walk across the graduation stage. These stories fill in the cracks of my college experience, and I feel lucky to be able to record them.
Can you imagine if every student at CU Boulder, since its founding in 1876, kept these memories that tend to slip through the cracks of time? I can only assume our school would stay the same, the culture similar, but students would spend more time watching and listening on the quad, on a roof after a party, or walking through the snow, living in a moment they would cherish for years to come.