Last year I ended Yardfest lying on a floor crying. This year I did the exact same thing. Am I stupid? No. Did I repeat my mistakes? Not at all. Confused? Then let’s backtrack a bit.
If I were to assign myself a spirit animal for freshman year, it would be a giraffe, because I spent the year stretched thin and awkward. My head was miles away from my heart. I walked funny (track injury). And whenever I tried to climb down into the real world from the empty space I was lost in, I tripped over myself and got tangled in a mess of giraffe-y, knobby limbs. Not to repeat myself, but it was awkward.
Freshman year, I thought it was a good idea to take Organic Chemistry after barely suffering through LS1A (I am now an English concentrator). I told people I did it for fun. I really did it because I didn’t know what I was doing in life, and it made me look like I did. I was so lost that I started hiding my psets under things in my room and pretending I wasn’t in the class when people asked. That was awkward, too.
Freshman year, Yardfest was on a Sunday, and my last orgo midterm was on the following Monday. On Sunday morning I woke up to my first panic attack, knowing that I was in too deep.
Freshman year, all of my friends got drunk by 2pm. They went to the Owl and bopped around like they knew what they were doing. I put my phone on silent so I couldn’t hear the group texts. I still remember the choking agony that started pummeling me as I tried to nap and delay the time from passing.
By six I assumed, by the noise pounding in through my Wigg-G window, that everybody on campus but me was schwasted. And I was alone in my room, panting, so freaked out by where I had got my giraffe neck tangled that I couldn’t even see what was written on the page in front of me. Sobbing and past the point of trying to be a big girl, I called my mom, who didn’t pick up. Then came the low moment where, absolutely terrified by how hopeless I felt, I collapsed on my bathroom floor (where I could hear the concert the least) and sobbed. Year one: Gianna ends up crying on the floor for Yardfest.
This year, I would say my spirit animal is a chicken (don’t you dare make a chicken Cacciatore joke). I squawk a lot, and cluck around my coop (the triangle formed by Adams, Quincy, and Insomnia cookies) as content as can be. I tend to get my feathers ruffled up from time to time, but mostly I just peck the days away doing my personalized version of the chicken dance.
This year, Yardfest was on a Friday. I knew what work I would have and I pecked away at it, grain by grain, until I could guarantee myself a full day of debauchery and another day to recover (of course, chickens are messy and some grains fell by the wayside, but that’s all a part of life). At ten AM the morning of Yardfest, I walked with a friend to the liquor store and strutted home with two boxes of cheap wine. I went to a few classes, ate some lunch, and was drunk by 3pm, at the latest. Granted I don’t remember as much as I should, but when I close my eyes I do remember flashes of dancing (probably eerily like a chicken) up on a picnic table, or on a balcony, or on people who were too polite to ask me not to dance on them.
Later in the day, when the parties all ended and I realized I had totally forgotten the concert, I found myself third-wheeling my way to Pinocchio’s. I had somehow lost my sunglasses, emptied my backpack, broken my phone, bruised my leg, and bloodied my knee (shout-out to the people who all poured Rubinoff on it to sanitize it though, it is very much not infected). Probably taking pity on me as I totaled my losses, the guy at ‘Nochs gave me a free slice of pizza.
I slopped my way back to my friend’s room (still third-wheeling). As they laid down on a bed to cuddle, I laid parallel on the floor, smiling and tapping my drunken feet and eating my pizza and not even thinking to check my broken phone. The setting sun shined in and dried my caked-up blood. I munched away, perfectly content. Tears started to leak out the corners of my eyes as the world spun gently above me. I was one-hundred percent, unbelievably happy. And I was lying on the floor, at the end of Yardfest, crying. Year two.
Is there a moral to this story? I’m not quite sure. Maybe it’s that in a year, your life may be a lot more different than you can ever know, or than it even looks on the surface. Or that happiness comes in the weirdest ways. Or that sometimes, life doesn’t go in a straight line, or a crooked line, or a circle. It just goes, wherever it may, and so long as you go along with it, everything can become a Yardfest-ending, spirit-animal-morphing type of wonderful.