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Last weekend, one of my friends helped me take graduation photos around Decker Quad. It was unusually cold and windy. We posed in front of the lecture halls and admin buildings that framed the well-tended lawn, forcing smiles against cool gusts of spring air that whipped across the quad.
So this is it — the last week of college. And yes, my last article. Goodbye, Perls of Wisdom. It’s been fun. I’ve taken the trip down memory lane a few times this semester. I’m more sentimental than I expected. Until this week, I had the false idea that school was ending for the summer and I’d be sitting on the beach with my friends in three short months. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening.
When I was nine years old, I convinced my family to drive 3.5 hours to Hershey Park to see a Selena Gomez concert. As a huge child fan of the Disney show Wizards of Waverly Place, I was thrilled beyond belief to finally see Selena in person. As we found our seats on the bleachers of Hersheypark Stadium, I gradually noticed the clouds turn a dark gray, and I soon heard the rumbling noise of thunder. As a massive downpour began, the opening act exited the stage, and the concert came to a halt.
As a writer, I started off wanting to explore the cool things, the unusual things, the macabre things — murders and betrayals, lies and promises, abuses of power, grossly violent crimes and what leads people to such dramatic actions. In my freshman year, the first story I wrote was about a man who got caught in a grocery store shooting.
In so many ways, I feel lost. I feel lost in the direction I want my life to take. I feel lost trying to figure out whether I truly know myself or not.
My mother has always been my icon. She’s a strong, career-driven woman; I grew up watching her get dressed at 7 a.m. every morning and have been an audience member at countless panels where people attentively listened to advice I cribbed about receiving on a daily basis. There is no question that my feminist ideologies largely stem from living with a powerhouse, but many equally important teachings have come from my father.
I can’t escape them, flowers — snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, dogwoods, other ones with sheaths of pink or jade. Walking to campus, to the grocery store, to the park — they’re ubiquitous, the shape of blooms worldwide. I can’t help but pay attention.
In my old house, above the cabinet with plastic bags and a large sack of rice, was a drawer with a stack of used printer paper. Every time my parents no longer needed a printed document or form, they added it to the stack in the drawer rather than throwing it away. This scrap paper stack was available for anyone in my family to use, but it was primarily meant for me. After noticing how I frequently used her printer paper to draw and write, my mother began making this stack to keep me from wasting blank sheets.
I turned 21 about a month ago. While it wasn’t the absolute rager my pre-pandemic self envisioned, I had so much fun. My friends and I sat outside with takeout from One World, popped a bottle of champagne my parents had given me, and then it was time for cake.
The recent announcement that campus should return to near normal in the fall provided me with a sense of hope that has been unfamiliar to me in the past year. The fog finally seems to be lifting as people get vaccinated and things open up again. I’ve been thinking about all the things I’m looking forward to doing once restrictions have eased up.
In one scene in Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, the protagonist Candace Chen visits Hong Kong on a work trip. She takes a cab at night, and the view becomes an “aching stream of billboards and advertisements.”
I recently stumbled upon a video of my 3-year-old self lying in bed, holding up a Fodor’s Washington, D.C. travel book with a confused look on my face. At the time, I couldn’t read yet, and I most definitely had not developed my passion for making travel itineraries, but I could pinpoint certain words and pictures that interested me. In the video, you can hear me excitedly yell, “I found the letter G! G is for Gabi...” in a barely coherent mix of English and Portuguese.
Tomorrow I get my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Since Florida expanded eligibility to all residents 18 years and older on April 5, I’ve been obsessively checking the Walgreens and CVS websites for appointments. I know my vaccination won’t change anything immediately except cause soreness in my arm and maybe some cold symptoms, but the moment feels significant.
I looked at my phone and realized it was April 11, which meant it would soon be April 12. That meant the most important month of the year was just around the corner for me: Ramadan (or Ramzan, the debate is kind of annoying at this point), and I was not prepared. Once a year, millions of Muslims (and some non-Muslims too) fast from sunrise to sunset, and yes, the fast means not even water.
Tuesday, March 10, 2020. 7:34 p.m. I sat slouched in my A-level cubicle, poring over Lineweaver-Burk plots and peptide-bond hydrolysis mechanisms, when I got the email.
Lately my dreams have been very vivid, filled with sites of past travels and visions of ones to explore once the world is safe again. My sleep has allowed me to escape from the current world, transporting me to a life where the virus has ceased to exist and we are no longer confined to our houses. However, this is sadly not the reality.
Expanding my cooking skills has been one of my highlights of the pandemic. But, like many aspects of my life this semester, my cooking habits have become haphazard, and I haven’t dedicated as much time to making new dishes as I would’ve liked. I’ve certainly made some really good stuff, like spaghetti and meatballs, curry and spicy peanut noodles. But those are all things that were already in my repertoire, so they don’t count for creativity or expanding my horizons.
Let’s talk about priorities today. This topic came to mind because, unfortunately, I was plagued by a particularly terrible case of food poisoning yesterday. Not to be too graphic, but I spent half the day on the floor of my bathroom, unable to keep even water down. Pale, dehydrated and flustered, I hobbled across campus to take a PCR test to rule out the possibility of COVID-19. By the end of the day, I could barely stomach half a banana and a whole piece of toast.
My grandmother is dying.
The first poem I ever loved was a monologue from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, delivered by the character Jacques and known by its opening line, “All the world’s a stage.” The poem explains the seven stages of a man’s life from birth to death, framed in a performative and lively manner meant for the theater.