I'm walking home with Gillian and Margie, my roommates. We've just eaten a yummy dinner at one of the fine Dartmouth Dining Services establishments (Food Court, I think), and we're headed back to East Wheelock in the gathering dusk. It's freshman year, near the end of spring, and it's been one hell of a week. No, scratch that, one hell of a term. I've had a bad breakup with a guy who I thought loved me, but turned out to be an abuser of both women and alcohol. I've been thrown from a horse, dislocating my shoulder and keeping me in Dick's House for a few days. I've tried to banish the worsening nightmares, but the only solution seems to be insomnia and a locked door. Lately, I've been struggling to just keep my life together. I'm depressed almost to the point of incoherence, and I seriously need to go home.
People try to help -- my parents, who are seven or so hours away and can't hug me from there, my UGA, who is very nice and sympathetic but who I will not let in far enough to help, or my friends, who don't understand where the ever-cheerful Alli they know has gone -- but none of them succeed. Margie and Gillian know this, and have been quite understanding about the whole thing, comforting me when I cry and listening when I talk but mostly not mentioning the really icky parts of what has become my life.
So tonight, while we're walking home, I'm just existing, not really thinking much at all. And Gillian, she makes this little noise, so I turn to look at her, only she's not there. She's a few steps behind, it turns out, and she's gazing upward. "Look," she says. Just "look." So I do, tilt my head back and open my eyes and see the most beautiful sky I have ever seen. It is blue, not just sky-blue or midnight blue-black but some color that I never knew existed, a blue worthy of capitals and italics and even then its intensity would not be conveyed. The color is something that I cannot, will not and maybe should not ever reproduce, something that I almost weep for because there is no way to preserve it. I want to cry because I'm a writer, not an artist, and there's no conceivable way that I'll be able to share this color, this feeling, this breathless moment of awe with other people. Also, I want to cry because I would have missed it, staring at the ground as I was, if not for Gillian.
And it hits me that life here is like that. There are so many wonderful experiences that you can miss if you get caught up in life's antagonisms, be they big or small. The moonlight falling on Baker Tower. The joy of a well-written paper. The feeling of snowflakes on your tongue as you dash madcap across the Green with a friend. The look a prof gets when you're in a discussion group and you get, you really understand, what they've been talking about for half an hour, and they turn to you when you start to talk with a fire in their eyes equal only to that in your own. The colors in autumn. Being part of an organization that entertains others (in my case, the Dartmouth College Marching Band, although I think we may be mostly entertaining ourselves at times ). Sleeping in on a really cold New Hampshire morning. A damn good political argument where no one has started swearing yet. The list goes on, but I think you get my point.
I look away from the sky for a moment, stop drinking in the colors to do something equally important. I turn to Gillian, who has since moved on, and say, simply, "Thanks." She grins in that impish way of hers, acknowledging me, but I don't think that she knows what she did for me that day. And she still wouldn't, except that I was asked to write an op-ed for the incoming '06s, so I guess I should take my own advice more often.
Dartmouth is like anywhere else in the world in that it is wonderful and horrible and beautiful and ugly and enlightened and ignorant and cosmopolitan and provincial and full of these weird little self-contradictory creatures called humans. That's not the surprising part " you knew that. The surprising part is that you can pick the parts of this institution that you value, the parts that you dwell on, and the parts that you take away. It's up to you, kids. Because you might be blue sometimes, but you'll be Green 'til you die.
