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Photo: Arami Chang
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“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver
The Australian electronic music group The Avalanches pull something of a magic trick on their song “Since I Left You.” The sample they use for the song originally goes, “since I met you, I found the world so new.” But when The Avalanches pitch the sample up a few keys, somehow all you can hear now is “since I left you.” It’s a difference that’s enabled by deceptively simple audio wizardry, a difference that can quite literally make or break wedding playlists, a difference that–to me–has started becoming vaguer by the day.
Much like a quarter of the students reading this, I’m graduating in June. I’m in the process of saying goodbye to all my friends and teachers at UCLA. I’m also headed for grad school in Chicago, so I’m getting ready to say goodbye to my family, old friends, and all of LA.
This of course isn’t the first time I’ve had to say goodbye. I’ve said goodbye to friends, family, pets, and memories before. You’d think that, if the heart was a muscle, I’d have trained it enough by now that this is all just light work to me. But lately I’ve been finding that hard to believe. No matter how many times I’ve had to say goodbye, it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.
The truth is I’m already missing everyone I’ve ever loved. And no matter what I do, I’ll always leave here knowing that there’s more that I could’ve done better. I could’ve spent a little more time on that one homework assignment. All I’ve wanted to do lately is to hold my friends close for 3 more summers. I’m quietly accepting the fact that I’ll never be able to tell the girl I like just how much I love her. There’s a lot of apologizing I need to do, and I don’t know where to start. I wish this wasn’t all so bleak, I wish I had some tangible advice to give but forgive me. This is my first time graduating college.
The grief I’ve been feeling as of late feels so impossibly large that a difference like leaving and meeting feels laughably trivial to me right now. After all, in my leaving, I’m also meeting new people in the process. But I don’t want things to change so quickly, I don’t want to simply fall back on second chances and redos. I want to tie up my loose ends properly, make sure that I portioned out all of my residual love efficiently, but I’m worried that I haven’t been doing a good job of that.
I got a little desperate one day and decided to express my sorrows to (sigh) ChatGPT. I don’t claim that ChatGPT is always correct (I even express my disagreement in my prompt), but I can’t help but feel quietly devastated reading this:
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For so long, I’ve felt so weak for being unable to flex that strength, that strength to “love someone openly.” I hesitated front loading all of my affection to my friends so early on into my college career–I guess because I got too scared–but I’m realizing now that saving it all up until the end wasn’t really the move either. During that time, that time I spent waiting for that conclusive moment of cathartic release, I set up all these distractions for myself as an excuse to push it all off and let myself get bored in the process. That wasn’t the brightest idea. I’m realizing more than ever that I need to openly act on the love I have towards people, everyday, all the time. I can’t give love away in discrete, loosely connected pieces. That’s just not how it works. To borrow the words of John Cassavetes, “love is a stream. It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.”
Lately I’ve been trying to let that love stream, not neatly portioning it all out. I’m letting my blood flow harshly, not letting it slowly drip. Don’t get me wrong, it still scares me to death every time I try. The larger each breath I take, the more awkwardly I inhale. I'm left gasping for air. But like ChatGPT (unfortunately) accurately describes, I’ve been feeling more “alive in the moment” than ever because of it. My lungs have grown more capacious.
This courage I’ve gained didn’t randomly materialize out of thin air, of course. I'm honestly forever indebted to the people in the MSE department at UCLA for drawing that out of me (via extrusion molding, obviously). I hesitated attending my first MRS event–I guess I just got too nervous–but slowly I began attending another, then another. Owing to our rather small department size, I have seen time and time again that the MSE department at UCLA is that much more open to expanding its community and extending a helping hand, no matter who you are. I can now leave this department feeling a little braver than I was yesterday.
It’s also why, no matter what I hear in “Since I Left You,” I think of the end of that sample especially fondly: “I found the world so new.” The moment I give my love away is the moment I’ll find out whether my fear was justified or not. Maybe I'll simply wonder why I was ever so scared in the first place. But whether I get hurt or not, whether I’ll have to leave or meet, I can find a bit of solace knowing that there’s still so much more that the world’s got to offer. That the world is gonna flaunt itself handsomely and catch me by surprise everyday. That I get another day, another chance at holding my friends so close to me they can hear my heart pounding for them.
So whether you’re graduating alongside me or (even better!) you’re staying here for a little longer, here’s what you should do. Show each other a little bit of tenderness all the time. Hold your arms open, let your ears tune out all the high frequencies, and squint your eyes until all the sharp edges soften down. You might begin to notice that words like blight will begin to sound more like blithe, formidable sounding more like formative, leaving sounding more like meeting.
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- Arami Chang
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