22,500 Degrees, Nat Johnson ‘21

Balcony — Andrew Knop ‘20

Moments

My first day of university passed as uneventfully as all four years of high school. Like children, we freshman labored through hours of over-zealous smiles and orientations. I could do nothing but watch as students only a few years older wistfully pondered our clueless faces and the boxes in our arms like they knew something we didn’t yet, but we would. Oh, and those cubicle dorms; we organized them desperately, thinking with unrivaled certainty that they were going to stay as spotless and clean as they were then. My name is. I come from. Something interesting about me is. Nobody wanted to stick out, but all of us yearned to be seen. Pick me! Be my friend! People were snatched left and right, pairing off in no particular pattern or order until only the timid souls remained and were imminently branded untouchables. Why did we do that? Did we even have a reason? I was dragged to the side of the tallest girl I’d ever met. A boyish haircut and a skeleton-skinny frame, she had a throaty voice, ragged, a sound like she was about to lose her voice, a sound that emanated strength and confidence. Meghan. Denver. I’m 6’2”. After the sun had set, all of us freshmen seemed to know about a party in some off-campus house, but we weren’t quite sure the occasion or who told us about it in the first place. And so, we went, Meghan and I. We walked across and away from campus, under streetlamps and stars, just two children playing house like we knew what we were doing. We entered the house; the lights were dim at best, and music blared from poorly set up speakers. We tripped over all thirty wires on the ground, and we laughed and we drank and we waved away smoke because we were big kids, and nothing else mattered but now. We didn’t care about each others’ pasts or futures, and I knew hardly a spec about her, but we could be and do and say ‘now’ and it was magnificent. Our new power consumed us. And that was how it was. We were invincible. We could defy all the odds. We could fly. We didn’t live under any grownups’ rules; because we were the grownups now. We feared no future, and we knew no laws and we were everything and nothing was going to stop us from having it all. We came down from that high swiftly but gently as the semester picked up steam and college slapped us in the face. But I never forgot those moments. The moments after I had left home but before reality set in. Whatever I do, whatever mistakes I make or chances I take are going to be my feeble attempts to feel that way again. But I never will. I’ll never be as brilliantly burning, as uncaring and confused, as ignorant, as innocent, as uncaged and newly liberated as I was in those moments. The moments when I was young and old and stupid but knew it all. They were momentary but everlasting, like first kisses, like first times, like first breaths. They were fleeting, and died too soon, and as such will be placed on the highest pedestal of the trophy cabinet in my mind to gather dust and must and moths - regarded frequently with novelty, but never to be touched again.