Anabel Moore

I would like to build a hat in the shape of Alexander Calder’s “Gallows and Lollipops.” I want to use red pipe cleaners and blue and yellow buttons, floral wire and cardboard. 

I want to retake my photo for the yearbook. I look like the grimacing lovechild of Lord Farquaad and Rapunzel.

I want to hand my apartment keys back to my landlord, return the overdue textbooks to the library, and beg for forgiveness. 

In other words, I want to cross the finish line. 

The first significant paper I wrote in high school was about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet:” about the ghosts being Catholic, or something like that. I remember a few lines about purgatory; not being in one place or another, and not necessarily knowing whether the road you’re about to take will lead you somewhere good or somewhere bad.

Yale is not purgatory: the roads after graduation are bright and shiny, not quite made of yellow brick, but certainly something close. However, the last few months of senior year are pure purgatory. In this anxious moment of change, I choose to hold on to the good of Yale. The late nights we love; the brilliant minds whose dining-hall one-liners could land them a job in late-night comedy, if only Lorne Michaels were at the table. I hold in my hands the stacks of blank-paper-turned-study-guides, snagged from the nave printers at Sterling; the security guards at Bass who reassure me at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the baristas at Steep who ask if a cookie would help after a bad exam (it would, and did). I will always hold onto the many professors, mentors, and friends who have taught me what it means to work for humanity, with a capital H. The good of Yale is not just the opportunities it grants us; it is the paths it affords  towards a life well-lived, full of light and truth. 

But in the spring-of-senior-year purgatory, we may also consider the bad of Yale. The stressed-out TFs and professors who don’t respond to our emails, then reply only after we’ve submitted work with the wrong header and the incorrect Canvas assignment. The many days with far more hours spent awake than asleep; the bunk beds on Old Campus; the defective hard drives that magically wipe weeks of research into a nebulous ether well beyond the understanding of the Apple Store on Broadway. We reexamine the friend break-ups and the real break-ups, over everything from politics to morals to a disconnect in values, and sometimes all three. 

The purgatory of the end game returns these memories to us. There is no longer a way to package them; they won’t translate into the Slack channels of our new jobs, PhD prospectuses or conversations with thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Yale leaves us with the shimmering strands of who we were, are, and will be. It is up to us to weave these strands into something meaningful. 

Yale has done its part. We leave our colleges to fight new battles, and for the university to find itself again. 

Seven years ago, I went to New York City for the first time with my high school orchestra. It was February, the air so bitter and dry it stung my eyes. I went to Ellen’s Stardust Diner and the Top of the Rock. I went to MoMA and lost the rest of the string section, running up and down the escalators, searching for a green hoodie or another bar of cell reception. I played the cello at Carnegie Hall, experiencing the first of many sublime moments in the years to come. 

Seven years later, I notice that the red seats of the Metro North are the same crimson as “Gallows and Lollipops.” My cello is now an expensive coat rack; I have several good friends named Ellen, and I doubt I will go to the Top of the Rock again. But I made it. It is time to move on, to let Yale — a dream birthed on that high school flight into LaGuardia — go. 

Thank you, Yale, for all you have given me.