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I was told not to begin a relationship during my senior year of high school. Everyone said it would be too much: balancing school, work, and applying to college — which, with any luck, would have me moving far away by the end of the year and long-distance wasn’t something I wanted to exhaust my time and energy trying to make work.
Scrolling mindlessly on Tiktok last week, I saw a video of an elderly woman, captioned: “I asked my nonna what her greatest insecurity was when she was little. She said she didn’t have time for that because of Mussolini.”
I remember locking my door, isolating myself away from the entire world. Sitting on the messily carpeted floor, my knees pulled up to my chest, crying into rolls of crumpled toilet paper. A few minutes later, I’d open my door and eat with my family at the dinner table like any other day. It was a seamless switch — a quick wipe of the eyes, a deep breath and the world went on as if nothing had happened.
When I first began writing, I had an unfathomable obsession with imagery. For hours, I would park myself at my favorite table at Barnes and Noble with my latte in hand and write pages upon pages of descriptions. Taking in the senses around me, I’d let my mind wander to places that I could only dream of.
I have a brief memory — it’s more of a feeling than a memory — of my kindergarten teacher playing blocks with me because I was too shy to play with the other kids. I have very few other memories of this time in my life, obviously, so I can’t verify it. But, as I said, it might be more of a feeling than a memory, an image my brain conjured up based on the emotions I’ve felt all throughout my childhood. Whether it’s true or not, the emotions are real, and they’re the same emotions I felt my first week at Hopkins.
I did not learn to love the land that raised me until I had already left.
If you were to ask me where I imagined myself a year ago now, I probably wouldn’t have said Baltimore.
The feeling of touching down at the airport after visiting home is one-of-a-kind. It’s the excitement of returning to Hopkins, it’s the gratitude for having seen my family…and it’s the reminder that I have to “adult” again now. I go to school in Maryland and come from Florida, but on a recent flight, I sat next to someone who is in the opposite situation: Her family lives near Baltimore, and she just graduated from a college around 10 minutes from my childhood home.
Growing up, I was always the "kid who stutters." My words would stumble out in broken rhythms, leaving me anxious to speak in public. Conversations felt like minefields — my mind raced ahead, but my mouth couldn’t keep up. I’d shrink back, avoid eye contact and dodge any situation where I’d need to talk for long.
As I was eating my lunch near the lily pond in the Decker Garden while writing my research paper and watching the new students explore the campus, it suddenly hit me that now I am closer to finishing graduate school than the day I started it. When I first came to Hopkins in 2021, the thought of surviving and thriving in graduate school felt both exciting and terrifying.
I think that sunlight on trees is my favorite color. It’s that yellowish-green translucent color that comes out, especially on sunny afternoons. Sunlight on leaves always reminds me of summer, and even though summer now fades, making room for fall, I still cling to its translucent, yellow-green warmth. So maybe this is my love letter to summer. Maybe this is my way of saying goodbye — and not just to the sunlight on trees or the lovely 80-degree weather, though I will certainly miss them both.
I would have started with “Dear Physics,” but let’s not lie to ourselves here. You are not my dear, Physics. What would be a good antonym for “dear”? Unbeloved? I’ll use that.
I remember sitting in my English teacher’s room during the last week of senior year, on the verge of tears. I was having an absolutely horrible day; I was exhausted, my limbs hurt a little more than normal and I could feel a stress headache from the subtly creeping impending doom.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. More specifically, how the same volume of time can be compressed or expanded so that a morning can feel like twenty minutes or five seconds or a week, even when the clock is ticking by at the same pace. I’ve been thinking about whether we can control it — not time itself, but our perception of it.
This August, the band Big Thief released a song called “Incomprehensible,” and it is about getting older. Yikes! Worst of all, it has wormed its way into a TikTok slideshow trend. Double yikes! TikTok has not been kind to the aging girl: a forum to promote infrared anti-wrinkle masks and face yoga and freezing your body in time, a platform for dermatologists who show you how drastically your young face will morph with the years if you do not buy their cure-all.
My last goodbyes flow out of me like a disappointed sea, breaking and offshoring between the rows of my teeth, shaking my lips. As I see my parents’ faces, I am reminded once again of what must be done. Packing my life into three suitcases, I head off to college once again, with a quiet hope that this semester will be far better than the last. I have opened and closed them many times, recounting each item, wishing I could pack my room inside the walls of the suitcases. Wishing I could take the crayon markings on my walls, the stickers of all the things I have ever loved and my family with me. However, as I hug my sister for the last time in months, like the last drops of water when a drought begins, I begin to realize the cost of my dreams.
My foot rapped nervously against the blue and green carpets that lined the University’s dorm rooms. Flooded with thoughts, I zoned in on the undecorated room with blank walls before me. As long as there is room for my pink stuffed animals and LED lamps, I’ll be satisfied. Analyzing the walls with scrutiny and armed with my measuring tape and command strips, I attempted to ease my biggest worry: Where do I hang my The Weeknd poster? To be honest, it was by pure luck that the 20x30-inch picture frame that housed my poster had survived the journey from home to here, and it was more of a miracle that I had any space left over to adorn my walls with “To-Do” lists.
For my entire life, I have explained, to those asking, that while I have a Hispanic-sounding first name, my parents actually emigrated from the Philippines. For those sufficiently curious, I have further elaborated that I was named after my father’s maternal grandfather, whom we refer to as “Lolo (Grandfather) Miguel.”
As I enter my final year of university, I find myself in a never-asleep-but-always-tired world, where we have the power to summon the world's knowledge anytime at the tap of a finger. Instantly satiating our curious mind with an answer without letting it wander and dwell on the problem has its own pitfalls.
One thing I never predicted when I started at Hopkins is how much I would change throughout my time here. It sounds silly because “of course college changes you.” Yes, I am more independent. Yes, I am more disciplined. Yes, I trust myself more (and also not at all). So, it’s obvious: College changed me.