accepted

I wrote this few weeks ago and waited in hopes of getting a very specific photo but alas – here it is anyway.

A few days ago the accepted students swarmed campus, as they do every April. Last year it was on the 20^th, this time a week earlier.

"Do you have a tattoo?" one asked another

"No" said a girl who looked and sounded like she cared and wanted to come off as if she didn't care "but I want to get one"

"I do" said a third, softer looking one "here"

"oh, that's cute, I wanna get..." and then they were out of my range of hearing. I walked on to change for tennis practice.

I remember coming and being so excited. I got a balloon that said "studio art" on it and the campus was (and still is) beautiful - though now I know that they trim the trees and plant fresh flowers and finally finish up renovations started months ago in time for the horde to look.

I gave a girl and her mother directions (or tried, I'm not sure which parking lot they were looking for and the one they described physically could not exist) and remembered asking for direction and someone telling me "past the chapel" and thinking but all three of those buildings look like chapels. The first one is a chapel, the second is Bard Hall, the oldest building on campus, and the third is a fancy grave I think, still not sure.

The food they gave us was the least impressive of the schools I looked at, and so my Papa's theory started: that Bard wants to push you out the physical realm by giving us shitty food, so that we focus on our intellectual and spiritual development, outside the body (he jests; we drink and smoke to compensate). I thought the girls dressed so pretty and daring. I wanted to read. Dance. Love. I wanted everything though technically I was still considering Umass Amherst and Clark.

Even as I remember these things, it's hard to know how it really was. What is it like to look at this campus with fresh eyes? How do we look to them? At this point I am: the trees, the winter-bleached grass, the cigarette butts, the bandannas tied around mason jars filled with tea or coffee. My face has changed so have my thoughts my dress my heart. I am: the buildings I lived in and the hours I spent, the broken glass by the waterfall, the faces which I have looked at but never spoken to. On Thursdays and Tuesdays, I get off the shuttle and go to the library to make myself tea and get my notebook for class. As I exit on my way to Olin LC, I pass a boy on the stairs with a wide angular pale face and dark hair and a beige backpack. As I walk on the path, I pass another boy who's tanner and with lighter hair, who looks at me intently. I come too early – before the previous class is out – and drink my tea on a couch outside the classroom. I saw one reading the newspaper the other day. I saw the other at the library. We do not know each other but we are a metronome keeping the beat for the orchestral campus.* All this I will carry with me when I leave. I hope my best years are still ahead of me, but I am grateful that I was accepted, I am grateful that I came.

*the saddest part is that I haven't seen either of these boys since I wrote this. devastated.