I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom, staring at the bed up close. My neck is craned slightly, my forehead pressed against the hard mattress. How hard must I press before I begin to feel its pressure? How much harder before it leaves a mark? A thin, red indent sears onto my face. 

I turn around and stare at the whiteboard nailed on the wall. It was made for me, but the words scribbled are my father’s. “GEPL, Taxes, W-2, Finland.” How long do I have left before I inherit those words? How long until I, too, am taxed by adulthood, forced to pay taxes and fill out mandatory forms? 

What shall I add to this to-do list? Career? Community? Fulfillment? How I long for the days when I could answer that question by scrawling on a post-it: “Write Discussion Post and Daily Theme, Study for Module 2 Exam.”  

Within minutes, my skin returns to normal. Light red melts into dark brown as blood recedes from my bruised skin, leaving no trace of my effort. My body cannot countenance such physical memory. Its cells, enzymes and repair pathways are engineered to resist permanence. I continue to stare at a white wall. No matter how hard I press, I cannot hold onto suffering. 

I often think about the day after graduating, the first day I will spend as a college graduate untethered to any institution. How will I introduce myself? As my entry-level profession? As a resident of the state I will temporarily move to after I graduate? Maybe simply as a 22-year-old. I hope a compassionate listener will be able to fill in the rest. 

I have always hated goodbyes. I begin each fall break, spring break and the beginning of the summer with a small pit in my stomach, counting down the minutes until I return to the place I have learned to call home, marveling at how much longer the days feel when I am away from so many loved ones. I learn to adapt by reminding myself about what a break is — it is a willful interruption, time for rejuvenation, a necessary separation that allows me to re-extricate my identity from Yale’s totalizing walls. 

The term “break,” though, necessarily suggests the presence of something being broken, albeit temporarily. For the four years that Yale consumes our reality, a break is time away; it is a widening crack, a fissure in college time that allows us to squeeze in an internship, travel to a new country or meet high school friends who remind us of the person we were before we sat in Woolsey Hall for the first time. 

Graduation is a debilitating event because it refigures our definition of “break.” After we are handed our diplomas on a sunny May afternoon, there is no longer a “break” from Yale; the summer after graduation is the beginning of the rest of your life. Our time at Yale was the break, a respite from the taxes of adulthood. It was the slow process of dipping your feet into adulthood’s eddies. One day, you wake up and find yourself in the deep end, reciting “GEPL, Taxes, W-2, Finland” as your lungs slowly fill with water. To graduate, then, is to feel something shatter. Perhaps it is the ground beneath our feet. 

Birth becomes irreversible at the moment the amniotic sac breaks. For nine months, an amniotic sac offers a developing fetus the most comfortable long-term hotel stay in the world. When the sac breaks, its contents leak out and are soiled by the floor it lands on, harkening the end of ignorant luxury. There is no turning back. The baby is well on its way. 

How many records will the baby break after its birth? How many rules? How old will he be when his voice breaks? How many waves will he see, breaking onto the shore of the first seaside town he visits? How many times will he have to break bad news to a loved one? How often will he break after he graduates? How often will he have to put himself back together?

I am less scared of breaks than I was a year ago. Despite my penchant for melodrama, I understand that graduating does not mean losing your community in an instant, or to be thrust into the world entirely alone. The day a scandal breaks I will be surrounded by loved ones, many of whom I met at Yale. I will think of you all when I get my big break. 

What I fear is the fracturing of memory. As I grow distant, will the days and weeks and years break into fragments, wafting around in my mind like scraps of paper that a young child throws off a rooftop into an orange sunset, never to be seen again?

What will it feel like the moment I enter my childhood bedroom the day after graduation, a sobering reminder of a foundation that outlasts all the broken moments I spent at college? Will the first day after college’s end feel like the first day you return home after a month-long family vacation — weary, disoriented and surprised by how moments that once felt so present now feel like a fever dream you can barely recall? How will I grapple with the weight of time? Will it break me? 

I sit in my childhood bedroom, staring at the bed up close. I close my eyes and I take a deep breath. I reassure myself these moments are still inside me. I relax. 

I hope that these moments will always be inside me, like the memory of a seed that pulses through every part of the plant that emerges from its ruptured coat. I hope that all of us will forever remain a part of each other. There are some bonds too powerful to break.  

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.