This is what it’s like to recall a dream. I can picture the rain and the puddles soaking into our slides on the path by the yellow house, but I can’t smell the mud or remember if it was a Tuesday. I can imagine the lightness in my lungs and how hard it was to laugh and eat at the same time, but not how it felt in my chest. Sometimes, I try to hold in air to remember. “Wind. Wind. Wind. Wind.” Eventually, the emptiness sinks, like the shuffling of overcoats or the closing of doors. I can never remember anything, yet being forgotten is my worst fear. When the party’s over, who’s left to pick up the pieces? I carried your bag of glitter to the music building and spilled green sparkles all over the practice room piano. “You can’t map emptiness. Only affiliations.” We all lived carelessly in these years.

My college was a place with little institutional memory. Just as the trees unceremoniously shook off their leaves and burst into flowers overnight, we returned every semester after ridiculously long intervals of separation to start anew, always unable to recall who we used to be. There was a disjointedness about the student body: we had no traditions, no stories, nothing to hold onto but a brutal history of hazing, fraternities, and white supremacy—all of which we tried to bury and rush past, like the archives in the library foyer that no one ever read, or the stranger in the dining hall I used to know freshman year. When it was autumn, it had always been autumn. When it was spring, it had always been spring. At one point, the world had stopped, waged a war, surrendered, and six million people had died. And then it was fall again, and we were back to doing drugs and blasting bad music on a Saturday night with three class years that didn’t even know that Frost had once entertained a student occupation. It was as if the pandemic had never happened but for the inexplicable fatigue that infused the air, the gaps between classes, the shadows.

In such a place, things seemingly disappeared and materialized without explanation. Some mornings, strange anxieties turned up in my tea, having somehow stumbled into the kettle during the night. After a long week, a bottle of sadness tumbled out of my backpack and I did not know when it had gotten so full. And happiness fluttered around as flippantly as a perpetually missing sock. We lived in cluttered rooms, and the ground flew under our feet. It was difficult to find what we had misplaced—even kindness, which was often tossed aside in a desk drawer. College, with its orientation towards the future and inattention towards the past, nourished a sort of selfishness. Too often, we ridiculed, flaked, bruised, burned, and betrayed each other, not out of malice but carelessness. That was the worst part about sadness: it turned us all inward and compressed us into narcissists. We were encouraged to use “I” statements and told to focus on ourselves. We attacked anything that questioned our experiences and quickly dismissed differences. All this was called “self-care,” all this we gave to each other. In the end, I wanted something tangible to prove that it was real. I received a license to pretension and a cane in case I tripped over my ego on the way out.

Perhaps a moment cannot be measured by its outcome. What I want to remember about college are the spontaneous affiliations, how, despite the depression, the disconnection, and the eventual decomposition of relations, on a distant and desolate planet, we drifted together as new myths emerged through the faults. Just when I thought all hope was lost for the day, you surprised me with a smile, a butterfly, a phone call, a pair of homemade fairy wings, or an umbrella in the rain. If you sliced the campus open, there we were in the common room on the fourth floor, capsizing with laughter as we ate the dining hall’s random assortment of strange little pastries while the wind zipped through the window like a comet. We were wrapped in constellations and evergreen in a madhouse dorm, the twinkle of our first East Coast snow that sunk into our tennis shoes, the trips to the bathroom as the music blasted in the basement, singing in the stairwell, walking in the woods, “walk with me, my soulless friend,” on the way to the testing center with a girl whose name meant “smile.” Good omens: the pale blue mouse in the mornings or the peach-colored backpack from across the quad. Superstitions: the time you held my hand when I greened out and we prayed because I thought I was going to die. I sat on the third-floor windowsill of the Charles Pratt castle as the world became quiet. On the bus home from Boston, I was sure I wouldn’t be alone anymore.

If time has passed, is it still yours? It’s like how we could never remember that particular catchphrase from freshman year. Perhaps I will never know it again—the disappearing feelings wink like stars as they dwindle past the horizon. But more likely, somewhere sometime there’s a round table and a few chairs in the first room of an old dining hall and we’re sitting there with a few plastic cups and the driest chicken in the entire universe. Yes, you say, it was real. We’re here, yes, and this moment will always exist because it happened. Remember the rush in the hallway, the screech of the wooden dorm doors, yes. The light, the air, the sky, the trees, it all happened, yes. And the smell of the flowers on the edge of summertime, yes. Yes, it’s real, yes.

Afterward, we go to the music building and green glitter glints on the keys of an old piano. Without thinking, I begin to play.