Eva Balistreri ‘21, A Brief Message Before You Use the Bathroom

Refection

I am the stupidest person I know. And I don’t mean this insultingly or offensively to myself, because I’m really the only person I know—know intimately, I mean, know the thoughts and hopes and deepest dreams of. And my dreams are very stupid, but at least I know they’re mine. I own them, birthed them—I’m fairly sure no-one else did—and I can be fairly sure, because I know I am, and I know I’m not someone else. And unless you’re staring at a mirror wondering whether you or your refection got there frst, you generally know you are and are not someone else. But to be someone else—imagine it, imagine being Not You. Imagine that. Maybe you already are Not You, that you’re Me, and I’m You, or we’re both Someone Else Entirely, but we’ll never know it because we’re both too busy being each other and thinking we’re being ourselves. I’m confused. Me, too. No, that’s not right—it’s me one, it’s one me, it’s me and my refection—what? We are large; we contain multitudinous thoughts and hopes and deepest dreams. Dreams? To die, to dream. To wake, to refect, to start the cycle over, to row, row, row your boat gently down the stream—merrily, airily, warily, scarily, death is but a dream. Or maybe life is? When you die, do you become Not You, become Not? Do you unbecome? Or do you become? Do you surface, cast off the Not You and become the You? Do you get a grade? A-through-F on the life scale. No, a thorough F on the life scale. An F--that’s a problem. A bigger problem than dying, in fact, and there are bigger problems than dying, if dying is to be considered a problem and not a price. If dying is to be… Dying is generally considered ‘not to be,’ but if you’re dying, aren’t you dreaming, and if you’re dreaming, aren’t you doing, and if you’re doing, aren’t you being? Being or dreaming, dreaming or doing, doing or dying, dying or living, living or loving, loving or thinking. The problem with the dreaming and the doing and the dying is not the dreaming and the doing and the dying, per se, but rather that you can’t come back. From any of it, because the being and the living and the loving and the thinking are irreversible, too. The problem, quite simply, is that you can’t come back—unless the problem is that you can’t go forward, in which case going back might well be the preferable option. But you can’t be in reverse. You can go backward, but you can’t be backward. You can undo, but you can’t unbe—not while you’re alive, anyway. And therein lies the great appeal of death. I think. Do you think you think after death? Do you think now? I sure don’t. I am the stupidest person I know.

—Bette Vajda ‘19