tones of the earth, some vermillion and ochre, the remnants of burnt terra cotta. paint the canvas sidewalks with pigments of past-lives. bare trees, naked branches. the hard crunch of dead leaves beneath rubber soles of laced-up boots. cyclic reminders that the giants shed their skin too; cower to their own survival instincts. crisp air, warm cinnamon. some things end before they can begin again.

“I think I want to be a PM.”
—all of us, at some point

There’s a lightbulb moment that happens. You hear the magical words product management and a switch goes off in your brain. You see the venn diagram with three interlocking circles and decide you want to be at the exact center of it—tech, business, design.

Here are two truths and a lie I wish I knew before I started:

when the greeks invented the word for myth, they found a place for all the stories they told and would continue to tell for years to come. when they found mythology, they also found logos. the infinite logic of trying to make sense of our own chaos as a people.

i’ve always been fascinated by the personal myths we keep close, woven into the fabric of our own folklore. i’m still working on piecing together the stories i tell myself. the stories we keep repeating even if we know the ending, because maybe this time it will be different. change the lyrics, the setting, the characters.

i can’t recall how many times i’ve listened to taylor swift’s surprise folk-pop album folklore since it dropped on midnight, july 24th. who knew the interminable summer of 2020 would coalesce into a surprise autumn from taylor swift? if folklore is a collection of taylor’s stories, then it’s worth studying why her folklore are the tales that are passed down and whispered around.

they ask every outgoing senior, incoming alum to submit to the red book. a guestbook of messages compiled for our graduating class, five years past commencement. this iteration comes five years premature, because the 2020 of it all demands recompense for the goodbyes we never got to have. some day, someone might pry out this paperback volume from a box within a box in their attic. they may skim through the pages of former classmates turned acquaintances turned strangers. it is a tomb, a time-capsule. perhaps they’ll stop at my name and read on page 156; perhaps they’ll find it here:

📕

I once heard that college sculpts a person like peeling a hard-boiled egg. We begin as a messy mixture of yolk and albumen—still raw and impressionable. College submerges us into boiling hot water and pressure cooks us: the proteins denature and all the soft, amorphous parts of us at eighteen will harden by the time we’re twenty-one. These years change us irrevocably and the laws of biology say this is an irreversible reaction; we can never go back to who we thought we were before. College beats and pries apart every piece of us until we fracture and break open. Whatever sticks by the time the egg emerges from the shell is the version of us that lasts.

Think of everything that has stuck with you all this time.

These are the things that have stuck with me: the endless meals and hours spent in Mather dining hall; the conversations with friends that continued through the a.m.; and the moments in-between when I walked through the Yard full of wonder and gratitude for my time here. I might not feel it now, but someday I know I will: all at once, all of a sudden, I will miss everything.

sickly sweet. swelters and scorches, almost cruel. melted popsicles and lopsided ice cream cones. sun-baked stories. some of them you repeat for years to come, some of them you never speak of again. feet in the sand, anchored in coarse grains of rock and sediment. caught in the tide as it recedes from shore; if you’re not careful, it will carry you out to sea. drifting endlessly in the interminable days after the solstice.