Ross might be another name for confusion. Or maybe, Ross was where I learned to accept confusion and uncertainty. Whether it was struggling to comprehend Dr. All’s tauntingly neat whiteboard work, or stumbling through a shaky proof of Bezout’s on Set 3, I had my fair share of pure, unfiltered confusion at Ross.
But nothing - not even the (in)finite Galois theory lecture - can compare to the confusion I feel now, after the end. I wake up each morning straining to hear the sound of my roommate’s alarm, once a haunting melody, but now something I yearn to hear, just once more. I wonder how my relationships at Ross - brimming with smiles and joy and laughter - have turned into the artificial light of phone screens and scrolling through photo albums and lecture notes. I puzzle over how the time between the end of Ross and the present only becomes longer and longer; how the agony of “if only it were yesterday at this time” has eased, but also worsened, into “if only it were last month at this time.”
I wish, desperately, that my memory were better. Then, maybe I could replicate her glowing smile in my mind’s eye, or replay his beautiful laugh, or catch a whiff of the conditioner on her sunswept hair, just one more time. Just once more. But would it be the same?
Often, my mind wanders, thinking about what they are doing right now. Is she waiting for the subway in New York City, does she feel the wind on her face and the roar of the train as it enters the station? Is he watching the sun rise in Shanghai, over the buildings that kiss the sky and the morning bustle of the city? I’ll never know, and I could never know, because these are the small things of life that aren’t worth sharing over a text message.
I forget that they all lead separate lives from my own, and struggle with the fact that they have beautiful, full existences that I might only be able to experience vicariously. They will sit in lecture halls and classrooms that I will never see. Their neighborhood streets and parks that they’ve grown up playing on, I only hear about in stories. They live in 10th floor apartments and suburban houses that I will never visit, and they will love people that I will never meet. I find this incomprehensibly confusing.
Most of all, I’m perplexed at the bottomless amounts of love, respect, and friendship that I was so graciously bathed in at Ross. Did I deserve it? I must remember never to get used to that feeling, since it’s something so extraordinarily rare, a community I’d be lucky to find a couple times in a lifetime. People whose ways of thinking are so startlingly, but comfortingly, like my own. People who laugh at the same things I do and who make me feel so seen and loved. These people, I know, whom I will never forget.