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It looks suspiciously like the first day of my freshman year, except this time more full. More alive. More vibrant too, as if the world had suddenly taken on a color that no LED screen had ever been able to color.
I am still far from my normal self. I’m shaking off all that rust from my conversational skills, which have shrunk and shriveled in all the months I’ve been locked in my bedroom. I’m slowly learning to match Facebook profiles to real faces, struggling to walk between Science Hill and Old Campus – discovering all these other weird issues that arise after what appears to be a year-long hibernation and half. But I’m overwhelmed by a sort of happy sensory overload, my spirits are bolstered by good food and even better people.
I write this as bursts of laughter and all those repressed words erupt from the circle of juniors a few feet away from me. There is the usual, nervous jumble of anxiety and excitement floating in the air. We look forward to all the work, the people and the late nights that lie ahead.
But above all I feel fear. It’s not every day that you train in what looks more like a cathedral than a gym, after all. I am in a place where 14 dining rooms serve me unlimited food, and world-famous professors share the same wood-paneled seminar rooms with me. I live in a residential college that deserves the Harry Potter treatment. I have century-old libraries with floor-to-ceiling shelves and a lifetime of books within a three-minute walk.
Tell me I am not dreaming.
Of course, glitzy Gothic buildings and light-flooded classrooms should never overshadow all the acres of progress and responsibility that Yale has yet extended before it. As an institution and as a university, this is far from perfect – Yale has yet to prioritize the mental health issues of its students, resumed its act in front of the large community of New Haven and confronted his troubled legacy of elitism, to name a few. But I still find it hard to describe the feeling, that disbelief mixed with equal parts of pride and joy as I find an unoccupied tree on Cross Campus or look out the window on York Street. The surrealist might be the closest to articulating it.
In the midst of the pandemic, we’ve created a school year no less memorable than any out of plexiglass dividers, Zoom screens, laughter and tears. Twelve months later, we kick off an equally exciting academic semester in crowded lecture halls and music-filled common rooms.
Maybe that’s the magic of Yale: the fact that this 300-year-old campus has always had something new to show us – to surprise us – behind every layer peeled and every year that passes. Whether here, one way or another, even after generations of shoe soles and stories have worn away these stone paths, life and learning never gets old. There is always a little more magic, just a few more pockets of wonder to spare. Like the Scottish Lighthouse at Woolf, Yale is a place – no, more than that: a special combination of people, moments and dreams all brought together with astrological fortuity and astronomical precision – that seems both time-bound and timeless, eternal, eternal.
That magic can occasionally fade, slip behind tomorrow’s exam, blend into the pages of our books, sometimes seeming to disappear altogether in the ruthless drudgery of deadlines and schedules. Life will get involved. But it will still be there, patiently waiting for us to return even after the acorns have been tossed or the 4 a.m. lamp goes out. These moving stairs, these talking fireplaces, they never really left us to begin with. We just have to remember how to find them.
For now, however, my heart is nestled comfortably in Cross Campus. I feel grateful to be surrounded by people who welcomed and uplifted me, one pixel and one punchline at a time. I feel grateful to be here.
The Sterling Memorial Library is silhouetted behind the students lying on the grass. I have books, whole piles, sitting in my dorm. A problem on which I have not yet started, an essay to write.
No matter. I still see the slightest hints of summer in the leaves. And all I want is to savor that feeling of wonder, keep it a little longer.
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