Content Warning: This article contains references to suicide.
My first month at Oxford College has been framed by an endless cycle of first date monologues: safe, scripted conversations aimed at getting to know the vaguest contours of the people who share my new home. I keep my trained responses close at hand for every introduction to an unfamiliar face. The start of spring semester has been fine — I am glad I got the time off. The small campus has made it easy to meet people, and I try to file away their basic facts. If I do not remember the blur of faces, majors and dorms, I have learned to assume pre-med and insert quips about how lucky I am to be in Fleming Hall.
Throughout my first few weeks on campus, I called my mom every day. I sent endless texts and videos of campus to my friends back home. For every text and phone call, however, there was one I could not send. Many of my newfound Oxford friends have sat on my bed on the second floor of Fleming, inches away from my closest link to my lost friend. None of them have heard me say her name.
Oxford lost one of its students a mere month before I stepped on campus. I never knew her. We never shared a class or a passing glance from across the Quadrangle, never got dinner together in the dining hall and never sat across from each other at a library table studying for our next exams. Had I not seen a couple social media posts lastDecember, I likely would not have known her name even after a month on campus. The silence here is thicker than fog, an extra-large Band-Aid over the grief that so many students are feeling.
For my first three weeks on campus, I could not go a single day without tearing up. I am not a crier. I had an endless list of predictions for my first month, and this had not been one of them. The blue-haired girl grabbing lunch at the taqueria in the Oxford Café mirrored the silhouette of my friend in line at Tango Mango, her pick for the best burrito spot in Massachusetts. The song blaring from the room down the hall on a Friday night was on her playlist. A girl I met in the library went to her high school. The faces were unfamiliar, the buildings unknown, the acronyms and inside jokes foreign — and yet, a campus my friend had never stepped foot on was somehow haunted by her absence.
Recently, I read the essay “home for the holidays” by Rayne Fisher-Quann. I thought the author had carved open my brain and read my every thought. In the essay’s singular footnote, the author explained that in trying to write an essay about grief, she had actually ended up writing around it. The finished product was “an essay with a grief-shaped hole.”
What I have noticed in my limited time at Oxford is that we, students, talk around things instead of about them. Oxford’s grief-shaped hole has already been quietly patched up and covered with a thin layer of spackle. The haphazard repair job is chipping at its corners.
Necessary conversations, the ones about our fears, losses and true desires, are rarely present or framed by whispers. We keep our interactions limited to our circles and our mounting anxieties unspoken unless they relate to an unpopular teacher or a dysfunctional situationship. The most open expressions of struggle I have seen at Oxford have been posted anonymously on Yik Yak. We perpetuate an environment wherein the only way to admit hurt is to depersonalize it, to hide it behind online anonymity or a well-crafted punchline. This fails communities because hurt, while universal, is always personal.
We are all lonely, stressed and scared. We are all afraid of saying it out loud, as if speaking will solidify its existence. Speaking does the opposite. Connection is the antidote to isolation, and connection begins with conversation. It requires you to give people a chance. It begins with smiling at that person you always see around campus but have never spoken to. It is sparked by sitting with someone new at lunch. It grows from exchanging phone numbers with a stranger on a night out and actually following up the next morning.
I did not know the student we lost, nor do I pretend to have known her. In all fairness, you could say I do not even know Emory University all that well — I have only been here a month. The grief felt by her friends, her family, her classmates is not mine to share or speak on. I can only express my own loss, the way my own grief-shaped hole is starting to close in on itself with every extra moment I spend in silence.
I am writing this as someone who has not yet been here long enough to have internalized the Oxford isolation culture as a norm. Opening up the conversation about mental health and struggle is the first step to preventing loss. We must break down the walls we put up between us and make it impossible to worry alone.
Nicole Rivkin (25Ox) is from Newton, Mass.
