I look at my final undergraduate year from a distance now and breathe a little more deeply, as if I were rowing away from the groaning pull of a ship disappearing beneath the waves. But at the time, nearly everyday I felt too empty for any creative industry, too tired for others, and too beleaguered to throw a contemplative look over my shoulder. I have never found a period in my life to be more impossibly difficult to translate into words. Some things from that year revisit me now: boarding myself up in the imperturbable silence of dusty old libraries, the smell of rich coffee constantly on my clothes, and staggering around on days leading up to tests, permanently dazed from hours of solitary study. I either genuinely can't tell, or just don't like to admit as much, but I have found that when the pimples come out--always in the same place between my eyebrows--there is no surer way of telling that I'm stressed. I remember hearing nothing but deafening silence from employers, and resigning myself to keep on going to the next application, and the one after that. Some things I cannot forget, like the way my roommate half-jokingly likened our relationship to "preparation for marriage," and all the things that my professors did for me. I remember staking out and pouncing on empty tables at coffee shops, late night walks back from the library, the howl of the train that runs through campus, and the company of a friend. And yet, try as I might, I still cannot grasp the fullness of all the joys and trials that the Lord has put me through.
Why is it that every couple of weeks, when I take my life out and contemplate it--asking where I have just come from and where I am going--I'm shattered all over again, robbed of all speech and sensibility? Perhaps the writer is weak, or perhaps the strength of the story is, in the end, a testament to its true author, and what you actually put down on paper is merely a pittance. When nearly everything I know is just an unfinished footnote within soteriology, the most beautiful story ever written, it quickly becomes clear that there isn't a sound mind, sentence, or anecdote out there that could contain it. After all, what other story ends with so certain a promise while fraught with equal mystery on the path to get there? You and I are part of a deeply redemptive narrative drawn up before time with the same hands that crowned the stars and raised the firmament. I can only reckon that it's alright to be completely lost for words.
