“Did you stay for fall break?” and I answered, “Yeah, everyone left so campus was really quiet.” In a whisper: “Was it nice?” I answered in a whisper back: “Yes.” “When my roommate came back on the last day of break I was like ‘Nooo…’” then we smacked each other trying not to laugh because we were in our dorm hallway.
My card was declined at the dining hall later that day. Which was perfectly fine, because it was Saturday dinner, the last day of the week, and they didn’t have the Halloween marshmallow ghost brownies anymore. I simply got my food and left because no one saw the little mishap. Outside, evening sunlight illuminated a tree branch like a leafy, suspended miracle.
Since I’ve come to college, over the past few weeks in particular, I’ve come to resent weekends because they instill into the campus a sense of vacancy. I’m writing this in the emptiness of the coffee shop of Saturday night, a single student at the other end of the shop coughing and a vending machine whirring in the silence. The line of morning classes, Halloween events, and work schedules that’s kept students and faculty in place all week, stretched taut, has snapped, scattering everyone like beads in all directions. The vibrant Monday-to-Friday energy has slowed and lulled into an inertia that appears in the form of the library, closed early, and the dining hall, still serving bacon and eggs at 12:30 pm. You would see students swimming around campus in smaller groups, clusters of two or three, or usually alone—either that, or maybe loners simply tend to surface more during the weekends, like smaller, quieter fish bobbing up to the surface of the water, blinking as they taste the sudden emptiness now that the chaotic rush of the entire school has come and gone.
There’s definitely a change in mood, especially among first-years, now that we’ve lapsed past the halfway point of the semester. I’ve heard it called the point where every college student is either half sick, behind in several classes, or just needs a hug. College students are just trying to survive, keeping their faces above the cold surface. In a way, they’re like fish that can’t breathe underwater. There are rushing, dazzling schools of fish leaving foaming whirls behind, and others by themselves, swimming a little more cautiously. But we’re all trying to stay awake and afloat, plunged into the depths of something that we’re supposed to live and thrive in, but really something we need to learn how to breathe in first.
When I walked back to my dorm from the library as usual on the night of October 1st, I saw this one room illuminated with purple LED lights, which created an eccentric effect when it shone through the stained glass window, in which a tired student running on two hours of sleep kept his cold hands hovering over a red-glowing keyboard. October 2nd, I heard of someone having a panic attack in the middle of a shower. October 3rd, five people didn’t come to class. On October 4th, 12am, the Class of 2025 group chat exploded as freshmen panicked, locking their dorm room doors as a rumor about a stabbing outside a dorm building spread like lightning, the same day that Rhodes College experienced the most tragic event in its near history.
The following week, Monday classes were canceled, a candle vigil was held in the honor of the senior, and dazed professors and students each struggled in their own way as they tried to process what happened. Personally, reading ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere helped a lot. In it, a college student remained in her dorm room for weeks, surviving on ramen and not answering knocks. She fell asleep on the floor listening to an old record player playing a Charles Mingus LP and dreamt about her mother. She missed tests. It was a kind of lifestyle that would only be possible for an emotionally destitute college student. October 5th, I woke up at 8:30 am when I had an 8am, and I felt my heart sink cold, not just because I’d missed the entire first half of music theory, but because I realized that there was no one to wake me up, scold me, and send me to class anymore.
October was difficult. It was jarring to lose the feeling of safety in the city I lived in. But the shock, I think, lifted some warm-tinted layer off my eyes. Every day, I started finding other college students, suspended in their own space of terror in a world called college: on the second floor of the library, a girl with her notes and books spread before her but a romantic teenage Netflix show on her laptop screen. My computer science major friend telling me she watched movies all night, slept at 7am, and woke up at two. Even in a book: The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood vomiting from food poisoning at a party, drifting emptily through New York City parties, and finding a way to cheat course selections without feeling good about it. It made me think, amidst my own tearful “I WANT TO GO HOME” video calls with my family, about how all college students are lonely. I think college is a strange place with imperfect people trying to grapple with the newfound fear that comes from living in a new city and realizing that, at age eighteen, you’re really on your own.
This morning, without turning on the light, I quietly stuffed my laptop charger and books into my backpack and crept to the library because in our room, my roommate was dead asleep from wherever she was until past 3am last night. (Or this morning. I guess.) It was sweet to see someone, at least, getting the rest that they needed.
Maybe in a few years I’ll look back on these forgettable moments during my first autumn at Rhodes. I hope I’ll remember how afraid I was as these weeks drifted past me day by day, because right now, it sure feels incredibly and unbelievably slow. Maybe, on that day, I’ll watch the fall of 2021 drift past me like a whirring, clicking little nostalgic film, or write it into one neat paragraph—because a narrative, like I learned in my American short story class, is a series of scenes connected by summaries. I wish I could spare you—and myself—the many repetitive or disturbing scenes of October at Rhodes College. I wish I could make it a summary. Well, I can’t, because right now I’m suspended in it like the autumn leaves suspended in sunset light I saw this evening and the unbreathing fish suspended in deep water that we all are. October at Rhodes was like sinking into the murky depths of a sea, but it was okay because everyone else was sinking, too. We held hands and texted each other asking if they were okay and watched the world waver like water.
