The Value of Light

December 12, 2017

I always leave my window open during the day, usually forgetting to close it before the sun goes down. When I finally step into my room at night, it’s often chilly, the California air exhaling through the curtains, tapping the tip of my nose. Never quite the right temperature. I like when it’s a little cold, though. So that when I’m buried deep in my comforter, I can wrap myself completely in the warmth.

It’s an interesting concept, being warm. North Carolina generally jumps straight from winter to summer and back again, setting aside maybe a week or two for pure spring or autumn weather each year. Back home, warmth is all-encompassing. I think of this past summer, when I would step out of my frigid office building at five p.m. and the heat would sink into my skin like a blanket kept by a fireplace, instantly, utterly, settling onto my shoulders and melting into every pore. I’d get into my car and breathe in the heaviness of it, and I loved it, how completely it calmed me.

Here, it’s a bit different. The air doesn’t hold heat, so the temperature always lingers around sixty-five, seventy, maybe seventy-five degrees. Sunny, cloudless. Perfect, I know. Everything about Stanford—just completely perfect.

It’s been kind of a shitty quarter. My computer science class has quite literally made me feel worthless at times—like I don’t deserve to be here, like I’m not smart enough or hardworking enough or valuable enough to be at this school, which is really only for the best of the best. And honestly, I am not the best at anything, and it’s the first time that realization has really been offered up to me, clean-cut and laid out on a silver platter. Somewhat conceited of me not to recognize earlier, I guess, but difficult nonetheless.

It’s in those moments—when I’m slumped, head in hands, on some dimly lit bench out on the street, the smell of rain rising from the asphalt—that I’m hit the hardest. I haven’t cried much these past ten weeks—I just haven’t had the time. But there are mornings when I wake up and I can’t even move because I’m so fatigued, and my entire body hurts, and I just wonder whether or not it’s all worth it. How this paradise, which I do love—I really do—can also act as my little personal hell.

I’ve had to adjust to the amount of time I spend alone. People are so much busier this year, myself included. Sometimes I sit in my polisci section and listen to this one freshman talk about how “stressed” he is for the final and how he’s “already started studying” and how if “anyone wants to review with him this weekend” he would be “totally down.” And I’m thinking, sweetie, it’s literally week eight. There’s nearly a month until the final. And also, freshmen. Dear lord. I wish I had the time to gallivant around SF and lie in Meyer Green for two hours having deep conversations because this is Camp Stanford and not Real School. I wish I could go out four nights a week and stress over the number of clubs I accidentally joined during the activities fair. I wish I still thought this place were some sort of flawless wonderland where everyone is happy and carefree and unique and amazing, all the time, always.

Sorry. I’m being facetious. I’ve become a total cynic in these past two and a half months. School is rather disheartening when you spend half your waking moments in the library and the other half divided between class, eating, and occasionally sleeping. I find myself searching, more and more often, for some source of warmth. Some pure spark of good—an unexpected laugh, a second to breathe, a candle tugging itself to life.

Maybe there are moments. Not on a daily basis, when a meal serves as a break that I’m not always willing to grant myself, when the hours tumble past but a week feels eternal, when it’s as if my to-do list never gets shorter, the responsibilities and assignments piling up faster than I can get them done. I’ve found myself, so many times, truly wondering why I am here. I should write on my resume: Not Even Twenty, Already Massively Disillusioned. My future employers would love that. Nothing about my day-to-day routine makes me particularly happy.

But I find warmth elsewhere. In hot showers, which remind me of one of the first stories my best friend ever told me—how, back home, he’ll just stand in the stall and sing, enveloped by the echo and the steam and the sound. Forty minutes into a ten-mile run, every muscle in my body finally loose, heart happy with the weight of the distance yet left to go and the people I have beside me and the sun just beginning to touch the earth. Dark quiet conversations with a voice whose rhythm I am slowly starting to memorize, piece by piece, cadence by cadence, beating with the pulse of three a.m. tiredness and, simultaneously, the reluctance to fall asleep.

Or in the arms draped around my shoulders as I sit at the kitchen table working, the chin dropped to rest on my head, the welcome distraction of a friend. The people who unfailingly bring a smile to my face. Those same people, who chase me around the lounge with a saltshaker, or stand with me by the dessert table and help me pick the crunchiest bits of cobbler from the pan, or run to hold me in their arms as I sit on the bench in front of Vaden, crying, the sadness heaving from somewhere deep inside of me that I can never quite reach.

It’s not that the two sides cancel each other out completely. It’s a sort of balance, a subtle in-between—a third space, if you will. The first hint of sunrise over the horizon. The final steps of a race. A flame pulled from both directions, and you’re left watching, wondering whether it’ll stay ablaze or gently flicker out.