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My first year at Emory University felt like it would never end, then it did. I was lost, searching blindly in the dark for something to hold onto. But looking back, I remember each moment of that year with an uncanny precision:
- 34 runs on my favorite trail
- 202 trips to the Dobbs Common Table (DCT): some alone, some with friends; none great, some horrible; all edible, all necessary
- three long conversations with my best friend (about the green dress she knitted to resemble a cabbage patch, the migration patterns of birds and her childhood in Loudon, Virginia, a county I call “rural,” which cracks her up because it’s only forty minutes from my house)
- 24 everything bagels at the DCT: some toasted, some cold
- 20 “Lullwater Review” meetings (and 16 of Alloy Literary Magazine)
- 49 visits to Lullwater: some during the day, others at night; some with friends, most alone; each accompanied by a calm feeling while looking across the lake at geese flying
- 149 visits to Candler Library; reading thousands of pages and writing much less; surrounded by floor-length windows and dark wood chairs and tables; listening to the small sounds that become a symphony of squeaks and giggles and breaths
- 1,951 sips from my water bottle that I so rarely clean up but fill up all the time. (It slipped my mind how much I used it and how little I took care of it)
- 21 long conversations with my roommate after days (which feel like years in college) of not seeing each other outside of the room
- 592 times I opened my laptop
- two hits of a cigarette (once by accident and once on purpose)
- three lunches at Falafel King
- one haircut at Supercuts
- five meetings with professors outside of class
- 267 calls to and from my boyfriend; no voicemails (I never set mine up); too many texts to count (but somewhere in the tens of thousands). Once we talked about how if you made numbers physical they would occupy so much space—the amount of times I smiled and cried to the sound of his voice could fill up all of Candler; if you were to bottle up every ounce of water in Lullwater, it would equal that same number
- 45 calls home to Mama. Every call was different, not noticeably, but she must have seen my growth from one month to the next; whether she or I knew it or not, these numbers were compiling
- 50,923 words scribbled in the notebooks under my desk or typed up and stored away in my computer; each one written with a purpose, each one edging closer to now
- 37,021 minutes of listening to music to get me through
- 10 haunting visits to the stacks (once I saw the sad lonely spirit that guards those animated bookshelves)
- 334 stories of all kinds, written and spoken
That all and so much more was last year. College felt repetitive and contrived, but it all mattered, I understood afterwards. I can’t make my new list until the year is over, so for now, unaware of the numbers, I fall in love once more.
Nico Mestre (25C) is from Arlington, Virginia.
