I am not good at ending things.
I’ve never really given myself the opportunity to hold goodbye's pose for long because it’s hard, and the world is turning. And now more than ever the world feels like it’s spinning too quickly for me to even stand still.
It’s the last week of class; I graduate in less than a month, and soon I will no longer be a student in the “academic” sense. I will lose a label we’ve all held on to for the majority of our lives.
I’ve gathered my memories, given them names and meanings and lessons, yet something is missing.
I’ve come to the conclusion that real reflection doesn’t come in pre-arranged sessions of thought. It doesn’t come when writing articles about ending things that haven’t ended yet or talking about the “good times” that only happened a few months before.
Real reflection comes when you realize that what you’re doing at a certain moment is a consequence arising from your past — when you see that you are a constant reflection of the things you did, accumulated and thought. This reflection manifests itself in the little (or big) things you do every day.
It’s when you’re stuck on a project at your first job and you suddenly remember what you need to do because of something your professor taught you one Friday morning. It’s when you look at rebellion in the context of the collective actions of a city and realize that the way you used to think was skewed, or that the perceived notions you had accumulated were wrong.
You’re holding a mirror; it walks with you. It shows you that your past is always taking place in your present. These things can be good, and they can be bad. But the mirror changes its angle each day. It gets dirty sometimes. Let it. Tilt it up or down. Cover it during the times you really can’t look back (nostalgia is the saddest of sorrows sometimes).
Real reflection isn’t the contrived collection of memories you pick and choose to examine but rather the moments when your memories sneak their way back into the present and affect you, when you’re forced to look at them square in the eye with honesty grounded in hindsight.
So this ending that doesn’t feel like an ending is difficult to reconcile, but I understand that things will come back to me when they need to. And as trite as it sounds, Hopkins will always be a part of me — it has helped teach me how to build an earnest mirror, how to look through it inquisitively and most importantly it has become an integral part of the mirror itself.
So it’s okay that this thing that’s missing, this formless piece of cathartic or elucidating past, hasn’t come to me yet. I’m sure I’ll see it speckling my mirror with dust or clarity in the years to come.
However, I do want to end things in the published voice I still have left here at Hopkins with a thank you.
Thank you for the quiet times spent writing articles in Gilman’s soft light. Thank you for the crows feet I’ve acquired from laughing heavily with the birds hovering in Baltimore’s heat. Thank you for the patience and the pressure, without both progress would not exist. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to contribute to my little sliver of human life, and thank you to everyone who has given me the honor to contribute to the beauty that is theirs. I’ll see you all again soon in the great depths of light you'll continue to pour in this infinite mirror.
