My Great Perhaps

I will forever be grateful that I had this last summer to slowly and deliberately bid farewell to Lawrence University.

            My life has essentially been defined by the fact that I am a late bloomer – the last to turn a given age, the last to get a “real” job, the last to fall in love, the last to do just about everything. That holds true when I am among both friends and family. When I graduated from Lawrence in June, I was in denial. Because nothing new had happened to me yet. I was still going to live in a place that was very much like living with my parents, I had the same clothes and friends and interests. Yes, it was summer. Beyond that, however, it was all the same.

            Today, I walked around downtown Appleton and I could not help but be overcome by the feeling that something about me had irrevocably changed. Lawrence is no longer mine. It no longer belongs to me. I no longer feel as though I can march into the library and demand an expedited interlibrary loan because I have a very important project to complete on a deadline. I am barred from enjoying the simple vegetable make-it-myself-every-night salads in Andrew Commons. I have no obligation to reserve rooms in the Warch Center for various organizations. I have no authority there anymore, and Lawrence has no authority upon me. It is indeed over.

            I think this sentiment is what caused the overwhelming feeling of panic as I fled the house where I have spent the entire summer in a moment of profound stupidity and selfishness. I could not pinpoint the emotion at the time. All I knew was that I was mad and that I was crying, and that I had no place to go. I do have places to go, though, that is the terrible paradox of my current existence. I have a great many places to go and a great many people to see and an entire life full of great perhapses and great perhaps-nots and something-elses entirely. It is unfamiliar and adult and terrifying. A glimpse of the rest of my life.

           

            Lawrence and the city that surrounds it now breathe of nostalgia and strangeness. Its rhythm is no longer familiar to me; its great beautiful trees on the green in front of Main Hall seem foreign and exclusive. The student discounts at the yoga studio no longer apply to me. I do not receive the e-mails my classmates and my classmates alone are now privy to. Now that I have left the bubble, I am more than aware of the fact that I can never go back into it, which is why my living here still, for the next ten days, feels as bizarre as it does. Lawrence was my home for four years. It is where I became a real person unique from others and also where I discovered I am the same as others. It is where I related, for the first time, to other people, learned to love them as they learned to love me, and formed lasting bonds with those who shared my room and my classes and my library and my practice room.

           

            I hesitate to say that my relationship with Lawrence is as fantastic as I am making it out to be (but don’t we all make things sound better than they were after they are over? Is this not the miracle of nostalgia?). In my freshman year, I hated Lawrence. In my sophomore year, I hated everyone at Lawrence. In my junior year, I hated who I was at Lawrence. It was not until very recently, at the dawn of my senior year that I learned to appreciate its eccentricities and mine in a happy marriage of both extraordinary experience and devastating loss. It was there that Lawrence and I found a truce. The finding of truces is something that sticks with a person.

            Lawrence will forget me. It will evolve into a place I cannot recognize in fifty years, and my shenanigans will be replaced with other people’s shenanigans. Other silly, poor, trying-to-find-themselves college students will walk Lawrence’s halls, drink its expensive coffee, make one too many mistakes, and freeze to death on the way to class. But Lawrence will become something that I carry in me for as long as I live. For all the bad and for all the good, it is a big part of who I am. All the people who were there, living, helping, teaching, and learning during my time there are an inseparable connection to my existence as I am to theirs.

            It is a strange thing, college. And it is even stranger when it is over.

            Ten days until the commencement of my great adventure. As I sit here in this coffee shop with two English books on the table (and a chai tea latte, of course), I feel as though I've taken some kind of drug. My head is weak, my hands are shaking slightly, and my left recently sprained ankle is uncomfortably twinging. I'm in this terrible kind of limbo that is neither European or American; neither Wisconsinite nor Floridian; neither collegiate or adult - in a place where the weather cannot make up its mind and neither can I. And while all this is useless drabble on a silly webpage it makes sense to me because my mind at present is full of just that: useless drabble. 

            It seems to me we spend a great deal of our lives attempting to embody adjectives and adverbs that other people want us to be: kind(er), soft(er), pretty(er), be smart(er), be bett(er), wealthy(er), search long(er), try hard(er). You should change yourself to conform to other's expectations - to what society desires you should be - for there shall always be someone better than you unless you have found a way to make yourself a whole person without their interference. 

            François Rabelais had some famous last words: "Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-être." OR, "I go to seek a great perhaps." Surely he was talking about the afterlife, as he lay in his medieval French home in a small town outside Paris. Yet I cannot ignore the greater implications of the phrase, which incidentally means so much more to me in French than it does in English. At this point in my life, it appears that all I have and do not have and could possibly have someday is wrapped up in those two words: great perhaps. 

            And so, in ten days I shall leave the cozy warm bubble of Lawrence in search of a great perhaps that is life and adulthood and love and friendship and everything else known and unknown in this world. For everything is, at this moment, a long string of what may be. And while it is terrifying, I must also remember that it is thrilling more than it is frightening. For what is life without a great adventure, anyway? 

“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.” 
― John Green, Looking for Alaska