I've decided to use blogging to process the fact that my beloved undergrad institution of ~1200 students and staff shut down with zero warning the day after class pre-reg for the Fall 2026 semester. Commiseration appreciated.
One of my favorite words in my native language is тоска. Yearning, melancholy, bittersweetness. But none of those are the perfect translation.
Тоска is the closest I can get to succinctly describing how I've felt this summer. But there's no perfect translation, and it's still not close enough.
How can I describe it in more words? How can I get closer?
Two months into my nicotine addiction, I watched as falling snow melted on my gloves and then when I lit my cigarette the filter got way too wet. Now, I can't remember the shape of the snowflakes I was examining nor the taste of that particular cigarette.
Once, after a party, I glued some of the glitter from my makeup into my scrapbook. I'm still finding shiny specks of it everywhere but I got so drunk that night that now the minutia of the memory that I was trying to preserve escape me. It blurs into every other party I went to that fall.
My first real 'boy' haircut was done in someone's freshman year dorm, a month before he hurt me so bad I couldn't even look at him anymore. I can't remember what my hair looked like or his laugh. It took more than a year to decide I should cut it again, because I wanted to pretend that I could remember.
I spent this past Winter getting drunk sprawled on the floor of my friends university accommodations. Once, I watched her fight to open a bottle of wine with a butter knife and then we drank the whole thing together because the cork had fallen in the wine and couldn't be saved. The purple wine stain was still on her wall when she graduated that semester. It's still there. Nobody else will ever see it.
Five days after the world ended, I did molly for the first time. Everything clicked into startling clarity and as soon as I came down, the clarity was gone again. I remember the shape of it but I couldn't save that feeling either.
Supposedly, every time you recall a memory, your brain distorts it. My first and only STEM class was an introduction to neuroscience and I still don't know if that's true or not. It feels true. Like I'm polishing sea glass, removing the edges with my wounded nostalgia.
My Junior year of college starts in roughly a month. I'm not excited anymore, but I was. "I can't wait to be back," I keep thinking, remembering the plans I had with my advisors, the reading group I was going to run, the class schedule I had ready, remembering late nights wandering the campus, getting bruised in hxc show pits, playing a lot of mediocre pool. But I'm not going back. Sure, I can still wind my way through the smoking areas, climb my favorite tree, hike out into the woods where the parties were, sure I can trace the graffiti my friends and I threw up on a whim, drunk and desperate. But I can't really go back.
Instead, I have to keep pushing forward: watching the last class graduate, watching the town turn the campus into apartments, watching my 900 or so classmates and upperclassmen, friendly acquaintances I'll never see again, scatter forever.
Elliott Smith hated it at that school, but in the last days of the semester I sat in my building's loading dock, wondering how he'd feel, knowing it's finally gone. I listened to Either/Or, shadowed from the sun by concrete, and watched smoke curl upwards. A dissipating thread that I pretended could connect us all.
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