I distinctly remember that bare-throated feeling of seeing my brother Jack's empty room the day after he left for college, that sense of losing my protector, my built-in companion, the one who always forged all the new paths a year before I did and then came home from kindergarten and taught me how to spell "dog" and "fish" before all the other four year olds.
I have a soft spot in my heart for the '10s because they're graduating with him, because again the thought of the seniors moving on to the so-called "real world" makes me feel vulnerable, like I've just been placed in an open field and the last line of defense has fallen.
I don't want to get too sentimental here, but if I have to reminisce about graduation, these are the thoughts that come to mind. Plus I'm already on that train so get over it.
I laid on his bed and looked at the bare walls that day and I cried. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a crier by any means, but the weight of that lack was suffocating. I cried not so much for missing him as I did for the loss of my childhood as I knew it, a loss that seemed so much more permanent. Without him living at home, the last stable vestige of what I had always known and identified as "family" was gone. It was just me negotiating my way back and forth between my parents' houses with no one to argue with about the implications of Megan Fox's overt sexuality in terms of women's empowerment, no one to argue with over whether we should watch MSNBC (his choice), Wife Swap (my choice) or Drake and Josh (such a good compromise), no one to drive me home after school and get defensive about how far to the right he always drives. OK, so it was mostly always arguing, but we very genuinely appreciated other's willingness to engage in any intellectual interrogation over even the most mundane of subjects. I credit Jack's relentless mind entirely for the bulk of my own intelligence. I felt directionless without him.
There were good things, too, after he left. There was never any pee on the seat when I went to the bathroom and I could loudly sing in my room next to his whenever I wanted. I got my own car and, even better, the coveted undivided attention of our five-year-old brother, who used to always tell me that the games the boys played were "for me and Jack only. Girls have to be the prisoners in the closet," (yeah, he's a bro fo sho). The year was strangely empty without Jack, but at times refreshingly so.
Jack didn't want me to go to Dartmouth. He hated the idea of me even applying to such a "blueblood good ol' boy preppy asshole school," to paraphrase him in the nicest of ways. But by that point it was too late. Within a year I had suddenly found how to be a leader in my own right. By the time he was obsessed with Fyodor Dostoevsky, I was really much more into Flannery O'Connor, and then when he subsequently got into Catholicism we had many emotional fights about whether dogma was implicitly oppressive. I was finally forging my own path, and one visit to the University of Chicago was enough to assure me I was definitely, absolutely not following him there too.
So from that lurching netless dread eventually came a necessary revival of my independent self, which must have somehow forgotten how to speak up during all those times I sat in the corner quietly and watched him play videogames with his friends or maybe even earlier when we jointly decided to name all of our pets Jack.
Now I'm reliving that dread, that horrible creeping knowledge that the graduation of the '10s means my own will follow far too soon after, and I'm not ready. Yes, though with that nostalgia comes the thrilling sense that the College is ours now, that we are free to shape it as we wish, I can't help but have the same thoughts I had when I was staring at Jack's closet full of hangers. The Dartmouth I loved freshman year has all cycled away, and what Dartmouth will I love senior year? Will I recognize it? Who is going to go on that FoCo run with me? Who's going to lie in the sun on the back deck of Sigma Delt with me? Who's going to make me feel less guilty about not being in the library to start papers three hours before (or after) they're due? Sure, maybe if I'm being real, most '10s I know lost their value to me the moment I turned 21, but there are still some I'll miss in countless ways.
I'm a little sister at heart and I find myself always looking up. What immediacies, what terrifying autonomy will I find when I must look straight ahead? What will I make of myself when the time comes to crawl out from beneath this Ivy League awning and face the crowded sidewalk with no one to tell me directions? And seriously, does anyone want to watch Drake and Josh with me?
