11/9

November 9, 2016

We are wandering. The campus, on streetlights, breathes deep. We stop in the middle of a basketball court and lie down and there’s a lot of light, but I can still see the stars. I don’t know any constellations except Orion; I find his belt quickly—three glowing dots in a row. I miss the warm oppressiveness of summer nights, and I am reminded of August, a year ago. The meteor-shower memories are ink-stained now, faded with the passage of these many months.

It is a different kind of silence here. There are not enough stars, and we leave before I am ready to go.

**

Not to brag or anything, but my sister just made what may be the best U15 club volleyball team in North Carolina. When she Facetimed me with the news, her entire body was trembling; she couldn’t sit still. In her eyes was a happiness so unfiltered that it bordered on elation, ecstasy.

Like the Eskimos with snow, the English language has so many words for happy. As if it is a sensation we should all be familiar with—as if by redefining it, we understand that we should be feeling it over and over, again and again. Happy. Euphoric. On cloud nine. The more you smile and pretend everything is okay, the more it will be.

My sister is cooler than I am. This is a fact. She carries an indefatigable enthusiasm in her smile. She lights up every room; she can talk to anyone; her energy and humor are, in a word, infectious. She understands people.

Yet sometimes—in the days of tryouts, when she hadn’t received an offer yet, or when inevitable high school drama gets to her head—she does not smile. She goes to bed early. Each sentence she speaks is punctuated by a sharp frustration, some little rage.

Other times, she is delighted, exultant, jubilant, blessed. She walks on the clouds themselves.

**

Lunchtime on a Friday. One of my friends has brought cookies. “I made too many,” she says by way of explanation, cracking open the Tupperware. On the floor, we cluster together, hands reaching, chocolate sweet in our mouths. Splitting the last remnants between us, making sure everyone gets a piece.

I have spent countless hours on this floor, complaining, sleeping, screaming, crying, laughing, loving—at lunch, between classes, curled up in a ball with AP chem or boy troubles or near-mental breakdowns on my mind—times when my own personal world seemed to be ending. My English teacher, to whom this floor belongs, there for them all, with advice or a hug or a helping hand. The world is not ending. And then a joke, just to remind me that I still knew how to smile.

These are the extra-cookies, birthday-brownies, cupcakes-baked-just-for-you kind of people. They do not come lightly. Yet somehow, here they are.

**

“It’s like utopia,” she says.

We are running through the Oval at sunset. Main Quad glows with the radiance of the California sun, the colors condensed and magnified and brightened into pinpoints of pink, blue, orange, yellow. The entire sky withdrawing into the nighttime, but not without a fight.

“Yeah,” I say. “Unreal.”

The sunset is darkening so quickly. The grass and bricks and sidewalks and roads stretching off, the places already run, burnt into our legs and our lungs and our bones. The people we have passed, behind us, still running. Miles to go before we sleep.

We reach the steps, pick up the pace. Tacit, unspoken, just the pounding of our footsteps faster, breathing harder. Almost there, so we can let the adrenaline kick in. It is a lovely feeling, to run this fast when you’re so tired—to know you’re almost done. To feel it in every part of your body, your heartbeats deep and full and alive.

The end of this race, somewhere up ahead. Somewhere in sight.

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