The evening after we graduated, my friends and I drove back from the Mooresville Chipotle one final time after we celebrated our graduation college-style—consuming way too much cheese, guac, and rice. As we neared Exit 30 as newly-minted graduates, we felt a sense of loss coupled with a strange anticipation of the future as we watched the rays of the setting sun streak through the cerulean sky over Lake Norman.
Listening to “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens, we talked about the attachment we feel to places, and about the places in Davidson that we wished we had appreciated more. We remembered simple things with nostalgia, like particular houses we passed while running on Concord Road, or mornings seeing the sun rise after pulling all-nighters. As Sufjan Stevens sang, “You had to find it / All things go, all things go / If I was crying / In the van with my friend,” I sat stilly with my friends in the van and cried for the first time, mourning four difficult, joyful, and transformative years, unwilling at that moment to accept the promise of new beginnings.
Graduation is complex. On one hand, it’s a celebration. Family and friends surround us and cheer for us (some more loudly than others…) as we cross that fateful stage. On the other hand, some of us may feel an acute sense of loss, as the world we have called home for the past four years has suddenly uprooted us, and thrown us into a seemingly boundless new world.
After waking up away from Davidson, suddenly everything at Davidson seems beautiful. Even the sound of Top 40 music blaring from the baseball field on Saturday mornings when I’m trying to sleep in, or the heavy bang of my apartment door as one of my roommates leaves the apartment, or the incessant ring of another roommate’s alarm as she fails to wake up, again and again.
I want to remember it all before I forget it—the Renaissance readings I never finished, the nights I stayed out too late drinking colored liquid from random coolers, the moments running alone on the trails admiring the verdant beauty of Davidson, the conversations with friends at 3 A.M. that never seemed to end and that I never wanted to end—I want to hold on to them. Yet even as the memories make me feel warm and reminiscent, they also seem to be fading already, now that I’m away from Davidson, now that I’m not constantly surrounded by that place and those people.
But I think that’s okay. What we hold on to is greater than those individual moments. The whole world is before us! And we will see each other again. We will still be friends. And we will still do all those things—party and make bad decisions and fail to be on time and laugh until we cry and cry until we laugh. For now, I am thankful for a place that has made me simultaneously sad and happy, for a place that has given me friends around the world, for a place that has made me more curious and contemplative and courageous.
That same evening after we graduated, my friend told me, “We won’t have Davidson again, but we will have more good times.” We won’t have Davidson again, but our Davidson experience doesn’t end at graduation. What we have made here endures, and the relationships we have made are ones that will continue to illuminate our lives.
In Emily Dickinson’s poem “I dwell in Possibility—,” she writes:
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
For Dickinson, the world of poetry is a world of possibility, a place of numerous windows and doors. For us, the world beyond Davidson contains worlds of possibility. As we graduate, I hope that we will hold on to Davidson as we discover those worlds, and I hope that we will dwell in possibility—