[essay]

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June 21, 2002

"Full circle," Nathan said to me this evening as we were walking toward the shuttles that would take us to Ryan Field and our commencement ceremony. I looked up from the sidewalk and saw that he was referring to my freshman-year roommate, Yongtae Kim, who parted ways with me after two quarters of mostly unpleasant life together so he could shack up with his girlfriend, Hye-Won, in the Foster-Walker Complex. I hadn't seen Yongtae in a couple of years, so that we ran into him on the way to our graduation ceremony, while standing in the shadow of the dorm where we all had lived together, was something of a coincidence. Yongtae walked by us without even acknowledging me; he was likely still peeved about my constant requests that he and Hye-Won limit their heroic sexual escapades to those times when I was not in the room trying to sleep. And then he passed and was gone.

• • •

Full circle, I kept thinking during graduation. Sitting on my right was Nathan, a friend for four years and a roommate for two, who I met during New Student Week when he drunkenly wandered into the PARC basement and collapsed in front of me muttering about the Republican Party. To my left was Emily, another friend since freshman year; she had placed a swatch of leopard-skin fabric on her cap so her family could recognize her amid the capped-and-gowned throng. Meghan, with whom I am so in tune that she feels like my rhyme, sat next to Emily and cracked wise. In four years these friends had left me and returned. We had been out into the world and come back to NU. And now we were sitting together for this last great burst of pomp and circumstance, sitting sad scared silent screaming satisfied (or not?) beneath the great flood of words being loosed upon us from the podium. The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, told us to end global poverty. What appeared to be the exhumed corpse of Tony Randall, on hand to pick up an honorary doctor of fine arts, silently reminded us to never grow old. A student told us to be strong like her mom, who survived polio, three bouts of cancer and (one hopes) a cheery canonization at the hands of her daughter, who also told us that graduating was like standing on a diving board, and you don't know whether you are going to make that perfect dive or do a belly flop. Later it was agreed among my friends that, standing high atop this great big metaphysical diving board of life, we would do cannonballs.

• • •

Are things, at the end, as they were at the beginning? Or is it that, at the end, we simply can't stop thinking about the beginning, the dizzy rush of days in September? I felt split, standing with my fellow graduates in line as we waited for the festivities to begin. Closest to me were my friends, and I held them soft and warm against me and dissolved in nostalgia. But I could not stop staring at all the friends I failed to make, milling about in their rainbow of tassels and cords, us unknown to one other forever. I wanted to reach out to one of these fellow-travelers and smile, say something anything and have them smile back. It reminded me of the way I felt as a freshman, when I would be walking somewhere with my new friends and pass another group of students. But for the accident of my dorm assignment, I could be walking with those people, who might be more fun or interesting than the ones dealt me by destiny. As I came to love my friends that feeling passed, but today I was struck once again by how random it all seemed — where we had lived, who we had known, what we had done. What strange future would have been in store for me had I taken an alternate course? How could I have made things better? How could I have made things worse? If you ranked all possible outcomes of my life at Northwestern, where would you place the life I led? But close friends held me close and my head cleared, and I returned full circle to the people who had been there with me since the beginning.

Next.

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