Anniversaries and memorable dates can be weird, particularly when it’s one you wouldn’t exactly celebrate or are ‘celebrating’ alone. I’ve always been a rather sentimental person and hold onto lots of little objects that remind me of the people I love, even if I haven’t spoken to them in years. (I also love collecting tiny boxes and vessels to keep said items in.) This, of course, leads to cluttered shelves and drawers, so I’m excited to move away from apartment living and have more closets and maybe a garage or attic to put stuff in. Lack of storage aside, these particular dates come and go with all of their assorted memories and memorabilia: romantic anniversaries, death anniversaries, and birthdays.
Junior year, for lack of better words, kinda sucked for me. There are many upcoming memorable dates, complete with lucid memories of what I experienced this time last year, and I have mixed emotions for most of them. During my sophomore year, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she recalls the year following her husband’s early and untimely death. I am not going through the extent of her loss, but I relate to the temporal way she recalls her grieving experience. Didion recollects memories she had with her husband, John, and her daughter, Quintana, on the calendar date they had occurred while her ‘year of magical thinking’ comes to pass. There are a lot of complex emotions she is left to process on her own, seeing as she lost the person she experienced them with, but the memories themselves are mostly funny or sweet. The message I took away from Didion’s book is that the first year after a significant event is the hardest, and after that, the dates start to soften and slip away from you, which is comforting but bittersweet.
The birthdays of some influential people in my childhood recently came and went, and even though I am no longer in contact with them, they still crossed my mind on their day, and I still associate the early September change of upstate New York leaves with them. I’m not sure if it is silly that I didn’t reach out, but if I spent every day reflecting and ruminating, I would never get anything done.
I have burnt a lot of wood trying to decide whether or not I want to stay at Stevens full-time for another year to finish a Master’s, and I am currently leaning towards no. That decision entails it really being my last year here, which applies some pressure and a false feeling of ‘now or never’ on whether or not I want to reach out to Stevens friends when dates I associate with them, good or bad, cross my mind. I am unsure of the answer and don’t think I’m in a great position to give advice, but the world would probably be a better place if more people spent less time ‘celebrating’ the hard dates alone.
