Waiting For Saturday

I went walking through campus earlier tonight. I was grilling with some friends in their backyard and the topic of graduation came up so I decided to take five. I found myself walking down O St., where the old tracks from the streetcars are still laid down, cutting through the cobblestone road. I wondered what the streetcars used to be like, what people would talk about on their way from Georgetown to wherever they were going. 

What did they wear? Where did they work? It probably would have been a pretty Black crowd. Did you know Georgetown used to be a neighborhood occupied predominantly by freed slaves? Did you know Georgetown University’s very own police department prides itself on tracing its roots to the night patrols that guarded the (very predominantly white) University from the neighbors outside of its gates? I wish I could tell you the stories about this school that have been passed down to me, if only I had the time. 

Unfortunately I don’t. Which brings me back to the barbecue and my choice to skedaddle. 

It was pretty late, 9 or 10 or maybe even 11 or 12. I was walking, walking, walking. My head was down, my eyes following the streetcar lines. No one was out except for me. It was the first truly hot day of the semester. The climate at Georgetown is not particularly forgiving and when the day ends, a respite from the humidity isn’t guaranteed. The months that rest on the edge of the scorching Washington summers gift many breezy nights like this. 

These nights remind me of the first months I was a student at Georgetown. I remember the first times I walked up O St. from CVS or the waterfront or dinner. Usually, however, I made this walk alone. The light breeze on my skin felt intimate, the air raising the little hairs all over my body. As I walked down the street, cobblestone gave way to pavement which gave way to brick. I found myself at the front gates.

I wandered over to the John Carroll statue, letting my fingers graze the lettering on the plaque, wondering absentmindedly if I would get sick from touching it before remembering that I had recently been vaccinated. I looked up at the statue and back down at the plaque. He had been 80 when he died. That must have been a miracle in those days. 

I looked up, and I noticed John Carroll’s shoes were worn from decades of students using them as their initial grasp in their ascent. I contemplated making my own. It would be a full circle. It would, in fact, be more than full circle. Freshman year, I hadn’t climbed John Carroll on my own. I was in a big group of freshmen coming home from a night of trying to find parties where we were welcome. We hadn’t succeeded but we still wanted to make it a good and memorable night. We were walking through the front gates and our eyes fell on John Carroll in sync. The energy shifted as our mission changed. Tonight is the night we all become Hoyas. We will climb the statue. I was too afraid to climb it alone and a nice boy who was already sitting on the statue offered to pull me up with him. We sat there together on John Carroll’s lap, smiling for the many iPhone cameras below. 

Now, I figured if I could climb the statue in that moment, with my own strength and dexterity, with no one watching, it would mean something about how I’d grown as a person, how I had learned in college to do things for myself and not for the gaze of others. About how I’d learn to self actualize. Maybe there could have even been a girl boss element to this story arch. 

But the thing is, I didn’t want to. I was tired and I’ve done enough growth this year, I know I don’t need to prove that to myself. So I turned away from the statue and kept walking.

I continued walking down the pathway that leads directly from the front gates and past Healy. I walked under the bridges and through the pathways that had mapped out my daily life. I looked up and watched the tree above me rustle slightly with the wind. It was hard to see the edges of the black tree next to the blacker sky. A bird sped past the tree, slicing through the collegiate pastoral scene. I wound around Healy and walked up to the courtyard behind our iconic building. I looked at the stained glass depicting Jesus and his disciples (I think?). When I reached the front of the chapel, I tried to go in but the door was closed, locked. It’s too bad, I thought to myself. This would have been an even more perfect ending to the story arc. 

There had been a brief moment freshman year when, driven by sheer panic over a recent heartbreak, I found myself in the chapel bargaining with the Almighty about what I’d do for him if he’d just make my life a little easier for a bit. I was sitting there in the church, staring at the paintings around the church. I remember that night feeling so much but being unable to release it. Instead it hung in my body, like the soreness in your muscles after a flu. I’ve been feeling similarly recently. There are moments throughout the day where my heart gets heavy and my muscles tense but I can’t get myself to the point of release. I stared at the closed and locked doors to Dahlgren Chapel. It would have been great to open those doors and sit down where I sat three and a half years before. The trumpets would begin in a slow melody that builds and builds until its crashing crescendo. I’d cry! Fireworks! Triumph! Growth! End of the story arc.

It’s a shame those doors were locked.

I walked out of the courtyard, and hung two lefts, turning under the bridge that looks like a cave with yellow insulation stuck to all of its sides and bikes stuck to that. I was walking along the eastern face of my old dorm. A new sign declared “ISAAC HAWKINS HALL.” I looked in through the glass doors at the building I called home for two years. Everything looked exactly the same as it had when I had left it to go abroad a year and a half ago. I never could have known then that I was giving it the Irish goodbye I never wanted.

Moved by a growing sense of nostalgia, I found myself walking the path I took nearly every day Junior year from my apartment to those of my boyfriend and my best friends, across the way in Vil A. The stairs to the rooftops were unblocked and the air felt good on my face so I walked up. A lot has changed between then and now. For one thing, the past year of working on my laptop all day, everyday has caused what’s known as accommodative spasms in my eyes which causes blurry vision. I could barely read the Deloitte sign from where I stood.

I watched the cars’ headlights flash in and out from behind the trees between me and them. They looked like they were moving on a conveyor belt. I thought back to a text I had sent my mom earlier that day. 

Me: “Graduation is virtual this year”

Mom: “*thumbs up emoji*”

Maybe that was what had triggered my fight or flight response earlier that night. If you can’t tell, I like full circles and completed story arcs. I’ve been trying really hard to cope with not getting that this time. I had a lot of plans for completing this arc. Some of them are on pause, but many of them will never happen... 

I remembered my friends, hanging out in my backyard, thinking I’d gone inside to check on the veggies. I climbed the stairs down from Vil A and started walking home. 

A few minutes later I passed through Red Square. I remembered the night before the 272 Referendum, being up until the early morning chalking up the bricks, writing messages of support for the bill. I thought about slogging to classes in the ICC, and eating fancy hot dogs at the farmers’ market on Wednesdays. I thought about passing by my friends, and passing by my acquaintances, and passing by my philosophy TA who I had a huge crush on.

I wonder which of these stories I’ll hang on to as I move through life. I wonder how these memories will form to create the tale I tell myself about my time in college. There are so many ways to construct that portrait of a past time, and truth is, the stories we tell ourselves have a lot of power. They inform how you view each individual memory and how you view yourself. They change how you interact with the world. You do things to complete the arc, to collect the memories you think you’ve missed out on. I wonder how much agency I have in the formation of these stories, though my gut tells me it’s more than I’m comfortable with. 

I was thinking about all these things as I continued my walk back to Burleith. Finally, I get back to my yard. I don’t want to rejoin the group just yet, so I lean against my backyard’s fence and watch. 

Someone’s playing music and James Murphy sings. 

I miss the way the night goes with friends who always make it feel good.

Madeleine is making exaggerated gestures with her hands as she talks. I can tell that story she’s telling from the gestures she’s making. 

Every night's a different story, It's a thirty car pile-up with you. Everybody's getting younger, It's the end of an era, it's true. 

Rachel is across the yard. She sips from her white water bottle. She looks over at me, and I decide to stop being antisocial and walk back into the yard. 

Break me into bigger pieces so some of me is home with you. Wait until the weekend and we can make our bad dreams come true. And if we wait until the weekend we can miss the best things to do. 

My time at Georgetown is not ending in the bang that I expected. I’m grateful that I’ll be walking across the stage to get my diploma. At the same time, there are so many things I’m missing that I didn’t anticipate. 

I’ll never get to see my classmate all dressed up at Union Station, dancing till morning. I’ll leave Georgetown with fewer second-degree friends than I hoped. I didn’t get to reconnect with all the people I was hoping to and I even lost some friends because of the pressures of the pandemic. But my senior year is ending here in this little backyard with the grill on. The sun sets late in the day now and the weather is just right and my favorite people are here. 

Life and its composite parts look like circles and lines and when things get confusing even triangles and hexagons. But mainly it's an amorphous thing that we hold in our hands and examine from all sides, trying to assign it form. 

—Toella Pliakas