Some of my ‘last’s at Brown have been easy to keep track of — last first day of classes, last Spring Weekend, last late night at the Rock working on my thesis. I’m writing this before May, but I have no doubt that my next few weeks will find me desperately seeking out other lasts, egged on by the finality of my remaining time in Providence. My unsuspecting friends will be dragged to the Main Green, picnic blanket in hand, to spend one more afternoon in the sun. I’ll beg them to come with me to our “Last Meal at the Ratty” if only to feign indecisiveness over food options that we have all had many times before. In a moment alone, maybe I’ll take a long walk across the pedestrian bridge, only half-heartedly chiding myself for overshooting the Hay, where I should be studying for finals.
But even as I meticulously structure the time I have left at Brown, there are too many lasts that have already passed me by without fanfare, poignant only when I’m looking back at them from afar.
Over the course of my freshman year, I must have introduced myself by name and concentration hundreds of times — never mind how unhelpful my “undeclared” status was for people trying to get to know me. Later, I delighted in eliciting amused chuckles with my computer science and art history double concentration. The STEM-plus-humanities combination is so quintessentially Brown that it is almost trite, but I still felt special in revealing — mostly to myself — that it was possible for me to be intellectually curious about disparate fields in deeply serious ways.
I can’t remember when it happened, but at some point, new acquaintances started to instead ask about my post-grad plans. So my default introduction has changed; I’ve turned from a senior concentrating in computer science and art history into a soon-to-be software engineer moving to Denver. Even if it’s just an indulgent excuse for me to reminisce on the hours I’ve spent poring over Italian Renaissance art, I miss being asked for my name and concentration. I don’t know if my last name-and-concentration introduction is gone. I hope not, but I have no way of knowing.
Maybe I started with this quotidian college icebreaker because as far as ‘last’s go, there are far more painful ones coming my way. Discussing the end of childhood in her film “Little Women” — which follows the lives of four sisters — director Greta Gerwig said: “Once they’re all in their separate lives as adults — Amy is in Europe and Jo is in New York and Meg has her own home and Beth is in her childhood home — they’re never all together again. The thing that they loved, that we love, is already gone. That thing of not knowing what the last day you had altogether was. You just know that you’ve never had it again.”
There will be a last time that I hear my housemates laughing in their kitchen downstairs as they make dinner. There will be a last time that I walk down my street and take a picture of a new flower in bloom, knowing that it hadn’t been the day before. There will be a last time that I luck into a table at Ceremony only to waste away my afternoon people-watching, rose matcha in hand. Even the long days with my friends during senior week will have their lasts, whether it ends up being the Friday before our families arrive for graduation or the Monday after, when each of us will get ready to leave the others. I can’t know it’s the last until it’s over — like Gerwig says, until I never have it again.
Maybe that is the beauty of these kinds of lasts, though. They are heartbreaking because they are moments that I love. Yet they are allowed to be so unceremonious because they are so common. I have lived these moments again and again over the last four years. They are everywhere, and they are uncountable. They form far more of my life than any of the grand finales I’ll celebrate during commencement weekend, and I still won’t get to say goodbye to them. It’s bittersweet, but I’m learning to find this feeling gratifying in its own way. For every one of the lasts that I overlook, I hope there is also a first that I still haven’t noticed, oblivious to how happy it will make me and yet to discover how much it will come to mean to me. Even if I only make such discoveries as a result of careless missed goodbyes, they are a testament to the abundance of meaning in my life — meaning that I can stumble upon by accident, meaning that I can lose track of, meaning that will return to embrace me on a random Thursday afternoon.
None of this changes the inevitable desire to say goodbye. Like Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth, my friends and I will be spread out across the world, starting new lives. Like them, we’ll miss our old lives — the sense of sisterhood and intimacy and gentleness they were imbued with. I know we’ll treasure how happy our time at Brown was. However, I also want us to remember that most of that happiness was so casual, so unassuming, so subtle in the places we found it — my purest joys have been quiet ones. If, over these past few months, lasts have been everywhere, it only means that in the next few months, firsts could be anywhere. I hope we allow ourselves to find them.
Anika Bahl is a graduating senior in Brown's class of 2024 and a former Herald opinions editor.
