finals@dartmouth

I remember last term around this time, blogging spiritedly about how difficult my finals period was, and how happy I was for it to be over, how I had fallen asleep almost instantly on my best friend's floor - it was all so romanticized, glossed and therefore glossy, but not deliberately, per se; that was my Dartmouth: an idealized everything, a finals period that was made that much better by my thinking it was challenging.

Well, my dear and devoted readers (to whom I feel the need to apologize each and every time I post for not posting often enough), this finals period was different. As I walked to Collis at 1:00 this afternoon, it struck me that this was the first time in five days - five days, mind you - that I had been awake when the sun was up. I had not, with the exception of biking blearily back to my dorm from breakfast at 8:00 am, been outside during the day.

I wish that I could explain this finals period to you day-by-day, but each day is a blur, sliding seamlessly into the next, the day bumping elbows with the night before one, after bristling with the impoliteness of the gesture, lets the other pass, a stranger into a crowded movie theatre, lost amongst a thousand twinkling stars. I can recall snippets, though, and perhaps those are my favorites to recall anyway:

...sitting at a study carrel on the fourth floor of the library, looking wearily over to my friend sitting next to me and climbing defeated into his lap to sleep for some indefinite amount of time, waking up only to see that the sun, from some invisible angle, had thought to light up the sky as though from under the earth itself, a faint and dimly-pulsing blue irradiating through the windows and illuminating my unfinished paper...

...waking up yesterday at 5:00 pm, struck by the inexplicable fear that for whatever reason, I no longer existed - I simply wasn't - and imploring someone to come talk to me once I had made the long and repetitive trek to the library in order to reassure me that I was, in fact, still alive and existing as a social creature, despite the fact of my newfound nocturnal nature; him meeting my perplexed and beaten gaze and saying plainly 'give up! sometimes you just can't write a good paper,' and me taking this as a dare, as a challenge to finish, to be done, at least; writing five pages in the next hour and a half, jamming my headphones in my ears and blasting an old Cake album to which I swiveled and danced in my chair as I added my final citations, knowing I was done - done, done, done, at last! - and wandering downstairs to disrupt one of the quietest parts of the library with a deliberately loud and hysterical conversation about, of all things, pudding...

...my best friend attempting to make me tea, a small gesture to return the favor of my buying her her favorite snacks; she inadvertently dumping the majority of a pitcher of half-and-half into my cup, turning my deep-brown tea a sickening white color; me taking her by the scruff of her neck and giving her well-deserved nougies; she running away laughing without another word...

...a two-hour conversation about the Dartmouth-y-ness of Dartmouth; the good, the bad, the inexplicable, the terrible and wonderful and strange things it had done to us, whether we could possibly manage to love it after all-this-time...

...wandering down to the second floor at 4:30 am to find my best friend tinkering with Computer Science-y things, and asking him to open Lou's with me (in Dartmouth-speak, this means going to Lou's, a diner in town, as soon as it opens, which happened to be 6:00 am); we had promised each other all term, and never did anything about it, but something about the prospect of French toast at the end of an all-nighter seemed too iconic and delicious to pass up; biking down main street trying to cast our friends as the characters in Harry Potter; nearly passing out face-down in our plates of scrambled eggs in our unmitigated exhaustion; sitting at the Top of the Hop and writing the final sentences of a paper on film-as-simulacrum...

...sitting in Robinson Hall at 3:00 am, all of us staring blankly at one another, or at our computer screens; for a moment, eyes meeting, a pause, and then the next logical step of 'Feliz Navidad' being played on full volume, singing along in horrendous accents through the entire thing, and subsequently returning to our work with hardly another word...

Staying up until dawn for five nights in a row is a beautiful thing, however horrifying and reality-bending and, at times, unnecessary, it may be - but I couldn't have done it if not for these moments, these people who I adore for their ability to appear at just-the-right-moment, to provide distraction or reassurance or even just tea and cookies; to be there for me. As the light fades (so early!) over the glimmering Christmas lights strung deliberately upon the Hanover trees to look so-haphazard, I think: only one more final to go. Only one more paper to write. Only a few more days until I go home. I wish I could make this last longer.