A Vignette: Two College Students, at the End of the World
Some background: This is part of a birthday present for one of my closest friends, so it’s cringy and sentimental, and there are some stupid inside jokes. We often joke about how we would handle life-threatening situations, like being kidnapped, or, I don’t know, having to save the entire world. This is how I imagine it would go something like. I just find it really entertaining to conceptualize the two of us, who enable each other’s idiocy, having such responsibility, when we can barely take a 61D to Mango Mango.
But also, there’s a dual meaning to this. We’re seniors, and we met during Orientation Week of freshman year. When I think of who we were, and how we’ve changed, it’s like flinging a thread back over a continent’s worth of mountainous terrain and winding streams and wildflower fields. We’re on the cusp of change in our lives once more. It’s scary, like staring over into a crevasse, but simultaneously exciting with the possibility that maybe we’ll fly instead of fall (Sorry … was that too cheesy? I’m getting the feels, if you couldn’t tell).
Anyway, hopefully you enjoy this too, and maybe it’ll spark a funny conversation with your own friends!
A Vignette: Two College Students at the End of the World
A chortle slips from me, and — God help me — it’s like the first trickle of water before the whole dam buckles. Laughter pours out of me, an unceasing, ferocious flood. I clutch my stomach. Tears spring to my eyes. The best kind.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asks, dumbfounded.
“Remember — remember when—” I choke out, before another paroxysm seizes me. I say, between lungfuls of air, “Remember when you thought that Cyprus was right next to Greece? And we had that whole conversation, and the entire time—”
And then she’s erupting with laughter, too. And we’re hunched over. It’s not the time. It’s the worst time for this. But we always said we were dumber together. “Imagine if we could go back and tell our freshman selves that we’d end up here,” I say. I flap my hand towards the burning sky, the chasm in front of us. The absurdity of it all.
“I would leave,” she exclaims. “I would go back to Nigeria, and I would delete your number from my phone, and I would never look back. Because no — absolutely not. I don’t think you understand—”
“I would find you and drag you back. No way am I doing this alone.”
She scoffs. “Good luck with that. You wouldn’t last a day in Lagos.”
“Bitch.” Then I point at her in a fit of cackles, remembering her hot pink bonnet, her inane “Hennything is Possible” shirt. Waiting for her as she ambled down the sidewalk in the sunlight on Margaret Morrison.
I feel more tears fall. Different tears.
“We were so young,” I say quietly. “We knew nothing.”
“I loved it. I wish I could go back.”
I look at her. She’s staring at the sunset, eyes shining. “Do you think we can? Go back?” Will we make it back? Can we return to how it was before?
Do we even want to?
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I don’t think so.” Clear, firm. She never bridles her words — never wastes them by giving them the chance to be unheard. In moments like now, when I believe I have only whispers left in me, she reminds me that our voices are one of the only things left in the universe that we truly own. That truth is an unsheathed blade, slicing bright crescents in the dark.
So I tell one. “I’m scared.”
“Me too,” she says.
“I’m tired,” I say next.
She tears her gaze from the horizon and meets mine.
Remember when I called you that day, crying, at the end of sophomore year, and asked if you would still care about me if I was a failure?
So many have touched her shoreline. There, it is warm, and crystalline, a harbor of shifting golden sands and shallow waters. So few have gone beyond. I have. I have tread the quicksilver waves miles in, where cliffs rise fathoms beneath the surface and rare, wondrous life simmers in the valleys below. I see it now, in her eyes. Those hidden depths sweeping over her brightness. Her terror, her grief. I see my fractures reflected back at me, and she doesn’t have to respond.
Remember what you said to me — that you only failed if you didn’t try?
I don’t know what will become of us. But if this doesn’t work out, we tried. I hope they know how hard we tried.
The heat billowing behind us whips itself into an inferno, scorching our backs. The thumping quickens, like the deep bass that would tremor in my chest at parties. Time is running out. I close my eyes for just a moment, remembering those ordinary, glorious days.
“I wish I had one of your matchas with the flavored simple syrupy thing I don’t remember the Korean name of,” I say abruptly, slitting open an eye. She begins to sputter, and, as I walk forward, her protestations rise in pitch. But I hear her footsteps behind me. Dumber together. Better together.
We make our way into the abyss.
