College 2021
Rishona Michael and Lara Stecewycz, two talented interns of Arrowsmith Press, have come together to compare notes on college life in the time of the pandemic. Lara has just completed her freshman year at UMass Amherst, and Rishona has just graduated from Emerson College.
LARA STECEWYCZ
I haven't been able to get out of here (my brain). I’ve sat alone for a year, in the corner of my room (and mind), listening only to my thoughts and the birds outside not talking to me. I’ve watched the seasons shift, flowers bloom, grow, die, and bloom again, from this same corner. Instead of moving through time, it’s as if time has passed through us while we’ve stood still, blooming, growing, aging.
Trapped in our houses, we’re double-locked inside ourselves. We joke — on Zoom, FaceTime — that holding conversations in person again will be strange. We have grown used to the silence like a bell jar over our un-shared thoughts, our unanswered questions. What will we answer when, face-to-face with another person, we’re asked, “How are you?”
Because such unprecedented solitude has forced me to become my own therapist, I worry about how my brain will react when entering a lecture hall filled with three hundred brains that have all been steeping in themselves for 16 months. The leap from a small high school to a sprawling university seemed merely intimidating last year. Today it feels somehow improbable. No more five-minute-drive to Henry’s (my boyfriend). No mom to captain my little boat, no dad to pull the oar, let out the sails. As the pandemic finally peters out, I realize it's time to pull up the anchor and set sail on my own.
Before the quarantine, I didn’t quite realize how hard we work to divide ourselves through politics. Maybe folks talk politics because they’re angry in an unfair world and want to blame someone too powerful to single them out or be personally offended. Being at home all the time with uncertainty and a TV remote doesn’t help. Despite living in Massachusetts and attending a liberal arts university (virtually), the two political universes I’m forced to navigate have proven loudly divisive. My father’s recent favorite mantra is: “If you can’t become a smart criminal, you’ll become a dumb politician. Either way, you’re stealing money,” at which point I rise and leave the room. I’m tired of fighting, of circular arguments in which no one gives ground. I find I’m every bit as committed to my own position as my 74-year-old dad.
Most of my peers agree, rightly or wrongly, that we’ve learned significantly less than we would have had we attended classes in person. Our faculty’s adjustment to this new way of teaching varied. Some taught asynchronously, which was a bit like taking classes via YouTube; others struggled to engage us and seemed even more flummoxed by the singular pedagogy imposed by Zoom than we did. The best did all they could to engage us, but without the energy and warmth of a classroom environment, even the best virtual courses felt cooler and more distant than a live experience.
Last August, beginning my Freshman year, I wondered how realistic it was for the university to expect students to be ready to declare a major by the end of Sophomore year. After recently taking psychology on as a second major (and potentially neuroscience in the future), I’ve determined that exploring and experiencing classes outside of one’s primary major is hugely beneficial. Studying brain chemistry helped me to see how my own reactions compared to — and contrasted from — the norm. Today, my range of interests has expanded: I’m eager to sample courses in theater arts as well as legal studies. I have to take it on faith that this circuitous route, with its numerous side trips, will eventually lead me to the one path I might want to follow for a lifetime.
Last year, I also questioned how college students could be effective activists while living at home. Instagram has shown itself to be a surprisingly effective platform. By posting a photo with a band-aid on their arm, my peers are striving to persuade others to join them in getting vaccinated. A photo of oneself without a mask sparks conversation in the comment section below. Step aside Fauci, there are new kids on the block!
Comment sections have replaced word-of-mouth recommendations and knowledge-transfers with as much dubious efficiency as Zoom classes did in-person learning. Now, we’re switching back again. I’ll switch because I miss the world beyond my little corner, but I’ll take some acquired habits with me.
I’ll also take more breaks — from work, from social media. Once I’d have felt lazy admitting that: I’d turn around to see my peers appalled, crouching over their homework. But our country expects us to be self-sufficient between 18 and 60-something, and only at 60-something do we have time to vacation and assess our lives, wishing we’d done it differently. We don’t bloom, grow, and age, but rather bloom, grow, work, work, work, assess, and die. In my room I look at my plants, but their silence drives me back to myself. I’ve become more attuned to my own needs. I’ve learned I need nine hours of sleep to function effectively. Isolation reminds you that the one voice that will always be with you is your own. And you will be with yourself long after college, when you’re 60-something and beginning to assess.
Although high school encourages a degree of independence, I expect it will be a bit of a shock to leave behind the room where at night I've played 80s songs to please the moon. Video calls will become a bridge back to the only world I’ve known for nearly two decades. I’ll decorate my dorm with photos of Henry, my friends, my parents, and a charcoal drawing I made in art class; I’ll leave behind the cheesy posters, old diaries, and other pieces of my childhood.
I often find myself haunted by poet Mary Oliver’s question: “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Some days I wondered what it might be like to live as a hermit, to keep myself trapped in a cocoon. I’m sure we’ve all felt this, however fleetingly. But then I remember the people in my life. I remember that someone will need a friend to listen, to give advice. In the future, maybe they’ll need my poetry to get through a difficult period. How similar we are to butterflies depends upon our eagerness to experience the rest of our lives: perhaps I will discover myself through the work I do.
When I finally arrive at college, I’ll join the other vaccinated butterflies suddenly emerging from their cocoons. We’ll prepare for the experience with a maskless, oddly-spooky summer as we begin reentering what we once called normal life. Reconnecting with friends has so far gone smoothly as we share stories from the last year. Already the thrill of normalcy is beginning to subside as we discover that, despite the strangeness of the last months, we’re not substantially transformed. All the patter about how this would prove an axial, transformative moment seems like so much hype. We’re still ourselves. We’re older but we haven’t changed that much. The world around us seems almost too familiar. Political divisions have not miraculously healed. We’ve simply floated up from the darker, colder parts of the ocean, back to sea level. At sea level we no longer need to hold our breath. But, while we find ourselves swimming in the same turbulent waters we left when we dove down, we’ve discovered a certain strength, a resilience we could not have known we possessed had we not been forced to go under. We begin our new lives, or restart our old ones, with the knowledge that we’re capable of more than we knew.
RISHONA MICHAEL
Last month I earned an undergraduate degree in Fenway Park. Two months ago, my school awarded me for my poetry. Two months ago, a man touched me without consent in my own home. In the past year I applied to grad school and thankfully received acceptance letters. In the past year I also received more rejection letters from grad schools. I worked in two restaurants, one shoe store, and as an online math tutor. I rescued a German Shepherd dog, had my house broken into, loved a suicidal friend, aced my courses, furnished and paid for my first apartment all by myself! I lost past lovers to death, lost childhood friends to death, drank with a famous painter, blasted music alone at night, dyed my hair red and then brown, ended up in urgent care way too many times, quarantined from covid, drank lots of coffee, picked up many books and then never put them down. I completed my senior year of college over zoom, and committed to a grad school program for poetry in New York. My heart has been tossed around so much, I have accomplished so much and failed at even more, and through all of this I have grown.
“You are Jeff” is a prose poem written by Richard Siken. It is sectioned off into 24 different stanzas with each section introducing a new scenario or placing the reader in a new character's shoes. This poem is long and confusing and requires multiple reads. While it starts off with two twin brothers, both named Jeff, throughout the poem they change. At one point the reader is Jeff, at another point the narrator is Jeff. Jeff becomes our boyfriend, father, and brother all at once in one stanza. He is constantly changing and therefore difficult to understand or grasp. Who is Jeff? Where is Jeff? What is his purpose? Siken repeats and brings back a lot of phrases and images which help ground the poem as things simultaneously keep changing. At one point in the poem there is a wrench that is introduced. “When [Jeff] throws the wrench into the air it will catch the light as it spins toward you. Look — it looks like a star. You had expected something else, anything else, but the wrench never reaches you. It hangs in the air like that. It’s beautiful.” I still am reading and rereading this poem to fully understand its purpose. However, if the wrench here is changing into a star, yet never able to be reached, then perhaps Siken used the wrench to parallel Jeff. And perhaps Jeff is a representation of life.
When I go back to my first article written before the fall, I sounded so sure of life back then — ready to take on any changes. This past year has spun me around over and over and over again, making it difficult to grasp anything. I was constantly taken by surprise. The week of graduation was somehow the hardest — not a day went by with more than three hours of sleep — but I refused to let my last moments of college defeat me. After all the essays, finals, graduation ceremonies, training at a new job, obedience classes for my dog, and more, I slept for three days, unable to leave my bed without feeling nauseous and exhausted until the fourth day. But once I was ready to begin my post-grad life, I felt lost. Anxious too. To go from so much structure to none left me alone in all my emotions and feeling confused.
Every night, my dog Ollie and I go to the nearby park to run out his energy. There's a gated baseball field which he acts like he owns as he sprints from one corner to the other. I appreciate this park for providing a place where I stargaze each night, trying to push my eyes to see beyond. To understand and discover what sits behind these shining stars that are so difficult to see in such a light-polluted world, wondering if they all began as wrenches that floated a bit too high and got lost, and became something more beautiful. One night, my friend Andrew joined me. Just two weeks prior I had to take Ollie to the emergency vet hospital at midnight. Andrew was sweet enough to drive us to the hospital, and then drive me home when Ollie had to spend multiple nights there. At the park, Andrew says he always ends up at the doggy hospital when his friends' dogs are dying. “I didn’t think he was going to make it then,” he explains. I didn’t either. Now Andrew asks me: what is one thing you want from this life? I answered quickly with a vague answer about being happy, or understanding love. But truthfully, I didn’t know — I don’t know. Is it to make sure Ollie is always happy and healthy? To feel blissful underneath the stars — watching him run back and forth, back and forth? Is there more?
This question parallels Mary Oliver’s question which Lara quotes: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Recently I have found myself being asked this question a lot. By my roommates over coffee while we still wake up, or by friends at night when we're out enjoying a drink in the returning heat of the summer. And the only line I have been finding comfort or stability in, especially when I am asked this question, is by Jericho Brown, “I begin with love, hoping to end there.” This line is from “Duplex (I Begin with Love)” written as a cento, a poem consisting of various lines patched together from other poems. As a graduation gift to myself, I decided to get a tattoo of a cento. Throughout my life, I plan to write a cento on my body, beginning with that line from Jericho Brown. I am unaware of the next line. I am unaware of what the last line will be. I am okay with not knowing yet where the poem will take me — poetry always allows me to discover more, this I trust. However, when it comes to life, the uncertainties are scary. Like Lara, like us all, I need to figure out how to continue after such an impactful year. I need to feel at peace with whatever happens next.
Jeff changes so many times in Siken’s poem, it’s almost comical — confusing at best. Time passes, for the characters and the reader. We see this as the Jeffs age, and as Siken informs the reader that they too have aged. The poem ends: “You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.” In the end we have fallen in love with Jeff — fallen in love with life, despite all the changes. In the end, we have discovered something greater. Once again, we have ended with love.
Rishona Michael is a rising senior at Emerson College, majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys studying and writing poetry and prose, and is excited to see where her writing will take her. Recently joining the Arrowsmith Press team as an intern, she has been working to spread the word about recent publications.
Lara Stecewycz will enter the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as a freshman this August. She plans to study English in the Commonwealth Honors College. Her poetry and short stories have been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and she has been a finalist for her school’s chapter of Poetry Out Loud. Lara worked as an editor for her high school’s literary magazine. She has also taught English as a second language. In June, Lara began working as an intern at Arrowsmith Press, where she contacts potential reviewers, publicizes journal columns, proofreads manuscripts, and is building Arrowsmith’s social media platforms. She is also the co-author of her first column in Arrowsmith Journal.