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Campus life by Zuni Chopra: To worship a mirage
That’s what campus life is like during the pandemic. And what’s it like for those who are stuck between making a decision to go for their dream college or postpone till all this is over?
Imagine you were a sculptor, challenged by your audience to push your growth as an artist to its limits. So one day, you decide to sculpt blindfolded. You tie a faded cloth around your head and you weigh the blade heavy in your hand and you glide across the patterned marble like a seagull skimming through white-tipped waves. You can feel something beneath your hands, something powerful, and you sense that what you’re moving towards is bold, beautiful, no less than magnificent. How badly you want to take the blindfold off, just to take one peek! But you don’t. You are diligent, careful, honest. You tell yourself you will put your feet up and relish in your masterpiece only when that masterpiece is truly achieved. And at last, after four years, it is. You can hardly breathe. Slowly, you lift up your blindfold to behold it at last, all that you’ve been working towards, to finally enjoy it.
Just as your eyes adjust to the light, to the gleaming, ethereal figure before you, a giant landslide bursts through the wall, burying your sculpture in bleeding shards and knocking you violently across the head for good measure.
That. That has been my college experience.
Naturally, it is a theatrical example – I am a theatrical individual. Prone to exaggeration. To nostalgia. To melancholy. I feel a hole like a phantom limb inside me, like the hollow gum where a tooth has fallen out too early, where I wonder when the four best years of my life drained away. Some poisonous leech has sucked the first two dry, and to be honest, it’s showing no signs of stopping.
It may be surprising then, since I feel so strongly about the whole thing, that I decided not to return to campus for spring. Of course, perhaps none of us will be able to – perhaps history will repeat itself and a week before the students are due to arrive, the whole thing will be called off. But I could. I’m in an unreasonably altered time zone, and I have special circumstances, and I can return whenever I like. And I won’t. Not yet.
At first I was desperate to. Here it was, the shining university life, and I was watching it slip through my fingers like dirty sand. I had to go back. It would be different, I knew – takeout meals and online classes and living in your own disinfected square room – but it would be something. It would be compromised, but it would be there. At least I would be on campus. I called a friend, asking to live with her, chattering about how much fun we’d have.
I was throwing myself at a wasted dream like Icarus throwing himself to the sun.
And it was this very friend who pulled me back before my wings could melt.
“I don’t know what to do,” I blubbered to her over the phone. “I want to come, but I just don’t know if I really want to. But I have to want to. I have to come back.”
“I don’t think you should,” she said slowly, and I was astonished. We’d been so excited. We’d made so many plans.
“If the only reason you’re coming back is the community, is the experience, then don’t. Because…it doesn’t exist. Not yet. Not right now.”
It felt like a bubble had popped inside me, a convoluted, toxic bubble – fear, joy, guilt, eagerness, all of it dissipated into my waterlogged heart. I had blamed myself for the doubt, for the conflict, blamed the comforts of home and how easily I bent to them, blamed my too-soft nature for being unable to do what had to be done; and in its cowardly indolence, for allowing my shining sculpture to shatter even further. I had felt so painfully guilty, so unsure, and so torn by this indecision – until she helped me to realize that it was never indecision at all, only a furious, stubborn refusal against that which could not be.
The dream that I once worshipped was now no more than a mirage; an oasis in the desert that I screamed at my feet to run towards. But my feet, perhaps wiser than I, were motionless, for they had long understood what I am now, finally, working to accept – barrelling desperately for the palm trees will never make them any more real, any more attainable. We are truly in the desert now, a flaming barren wasteland, and we will get through only one step at a time.
Zuni Chopra is currently a freshman at Stanford university where she’s studying the creative arts. She has authored three books of poetry and one novel. Through this column, she chronicles her journey as an international student leaving home for the first time to study abroad.
From HT Brunch, March 14, 2021
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