A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of going out to lunch with a PWILD friend, a 2006 alum who is now returning to school to get a bachelor's in an entirely different subject.
"A lot of people told me it was okay that I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life senior year," he said when I told him I had no plans for next year. He grinned and continued in his typically deadpan fashion, "I have a lot of resentment towards those people."
Despite his disconcerting words, and my own moments of crippling doubt, lately I am oddly content with my imminent entrance into the unknown.
Physicist Erwin Schrodinger once devised a thought experiment that explained quantum physics with an indecisive cat. What if, Schrodinger asked, you placed the cat in a sealed box with a loaded gun (or a flask of poison, depending on your version) that could be made to fire (killing the cat) or not fire (keeping it alive), depending on a completely random atomic event?
Eventually you would come back to the room, open the box and observe that the cat had either died or survived. But until that moment of observation, that moment of decision, Schrodinger suggested that the poor cat would not be in one state or the other, but simultaneously alive and dead.
This is why periods of beatific calm alternate with panic when I contemplate my uncertain future. Any number of great jobs and great futures await me, I'm told, and there's both excitement and comfort in those plurals. Because as long as I don't pick one future, singular, as long as I don't open that box and observe the result, then I haven't made the wrong decision. As long as I don't move to D.C., or move back home, or work for a newspaper in Turkey, or go wherever he goes, I can do all of these things. The cat, unobserved, is both alive and dead. And I set out into adulthood with infinite possibility as my only paycheck.
That my state of mind two weeks before graduation resembles a zombie cat makes contemplating my departure from Duke complicated. May 10, I've been told, is not just about ending college but about commencing a new phase of my life. But what I'm commencing at the end of August is a limbo that is impossible to visualize, even though it might not be half bad. The senior year milestones-the last game in Cameron, the last day with PWILD in Pisgah, the last Last Day of Classes-feel less momentous than they should, and I in turn feel a bit disingenuous taking part.
Yet I've resisted taking refuge in nostalgia, and if I were offered another year at Duke, no strings attached, I would refuse. Because it is the knowledge that my time here is limited that has made this year the most beautiful of the four.
Never again will we have the opportunity to say goodbye to such a transformative phase of our lives with so much notice or neatness. When we move, or change jobs, or end a relationship or lose a loved one, it will not be an event foretold four (or really, 22) years ago. There will be times when we won't get to say goodbye at all.
And so, blessed for once with a set date and time (and Oprah!) to mark a goodbye, I have tried as best I can to settle my tab with Duke and to ready myself for the end of college and the commencement of limbo. As much as I've invested in creating a life here-falling in love, buying an armchair, tending to my mint plant-I've done so in full knowledge and acceptance of the impermanence of the setting.
I'm writing this from a rocking chair on the front porch of the house I've grown to love, despite its warped floors and wicker furniture. I don't know where home will be in a month, but I know it won't be here.
I'm prepared to leave the house and the Chapel, Sunday PWILD meetings and Loco Pops, Sitar lunches and the couches in the lounge of 301 Flowers.
But I'll be damned if I can so coolly take leave of those who have made Duke my home-those who speak an intimate language born in four years of laughing and crying and tenting-and know that a thrupple is a three-person couple and a Kel spritzer is red wine and orange soda and a snap of the fingers is a sign of agreement and "Ditto" is an acceptable response to "I love you."
So I'll do whatever I can to keep them close, wherever home becomes after I open the box. And I will open the box, sooner or later. Because the end of man is to know.
Leslie Griffith is a Trinity senior and Towerview associate editor. She is former editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.