1/18/26

You sit in the middle of your college cafeteria—top floor—and things become very apparent to you, very quickly.

One. Your stomach hurts. Another girl is wincing in what seems like sympathy—how convenient. It should feel like solidarity, but it isn’t—you most likely are not in pain for similar reasons.

Two. A man you have never seen before, although the back of his head looks familiar, is scrubbing the empty tabletops with a wet cloth. His lips are set. When you look at him, his eyes do not rise.

Three. A mixed group of kids walk past you in mish-mash twos and threes. It reminds you of the summertime, and who you knew, the pairs you acknowledged and were a part of.

Four. Tears do not come, but the rotting, aching feeling persists. It does not matter—you have been reading your aunt and mother’s letters; real, tangible proof of the perseverance of joy beyond grief, beyond losing people—dead, living, or otherwise existing in perpetual limbo.

(This limbo is unfixable and not your fault.)

It is a scary thing—changes, in the new year, are coming quickly. Your hair is longer. You no longer shake at the thought of failure. The cuts on your fingers are finally from food wrappers. Humiliation makes a laughing fool of you.

Fate sometimes comes up in conversation. This is not a reason to become detached, or afraid. It is not a sign. You are nineteen—people start thinking of things, of the future. Relax. It’s 5:55, but there are no angels coming to kill you.

Or maybe there are. They just haven’t arrived yet. Does heaven take Uber?

You have an aborted thought, very quick, that sets off the pessimist in you: What kind of person cowers in the face of change?

An existing, honest one. May your cowering persist, and yet not hinder you from propelling forward. May your cowardice make a fool of you, a few times, until it steps aside for your determination to accept such changes as they are.

Sunday in the cafeteria is a time of introspection.

You may never know it again, but it exists here now. Even if you forget, it will be back. 

These things tend to.