The season of farewell is upon us. As we move into our last few weeks of college, the level of nostalgia and happiness is palpable. My Facebook and Instagram feed is already inundated with tons and tons of pictures. Pictures that are a lot more than just the few seconds it took to click them. All of them carry within them stories, laughs, tears, friendships and so much more. They are sacred, in some mysterious way. And we have the luxury today to document each and every one of these moments. But I can’t bring myself to share mine on social media. Come to think of it, I haven’t properly wrapped my head around the idea of what college and college life meant to me.

Those who know me, know that I had a very love-hate relationship with college. It was not love at first sight. At times, I even wondered if there was any love at all. A lot of days were spent in frustration about anything and everything, there were some days that dragged on with an overwhelming sadness, when nothing was working, and then, there were a handful of days when I was, at best, indifferent to what was going around me. But things weren’t all as bad as I’m making them out to be. Every so often, there were days when sitting in the company of my friends, having Rajma Chawal at Mic-Mac and talking about anything and everything under the sun felt like it was as good as it will ever get. That I was making memories that I may look back upon with bittersweet fondness.

I owe a lot of my happiness here to the people I met. I won’t take names, for I fear I can’t cover everyone, and this isn’t meant to be an Acknowledgments section, but just know that I am deeply grateful. For your time, your jokes, your company, the reliability of your ears to listen and your shoulders to lean on, your money for all the food eaten (kidding), and your friendship. And I hope I did the same for as many as I possibly could have. College wasn’t easy to get through, but you all made it easier. Certainly. I have lost track of the millions of moments that we created. Antics in the lectures, gossip in the labs, collective commiserations during the exams, random lunches, long walks in the campus, the trips and the trips(pun intended), the sheer volume of Arora Lemon devoured, and all those ideas and startups and podcasts and what not that we so casually discussed and planned but never materialized. I wonder if I should have documented them as much as I could have. That’s not the only thing I wonder about, though.

I have had an enriching experience here. I am definitely not the same person that walked inside the campus in August 2014. Yet, I can’t help but feel… incomplete, if that even makes sense. As thankful as I am for the wonderful things that happened (and there were many), I can’t shake off this nagging sense of disappointment at not having done all that I could have. I suppose it is natural to have that Robert Frost poem playing in your head in moments like this, but my predicament is more of what Sylvia Plath talked of, in ‘The Bell Jar’.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

It is that feeling of wanting to do so much and being overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all, that you end up going nowhere. It’s about trying things and never feeling them call out to you as much as you call out to them. It’s about attaching the label of passion to every skill you pick up, but knowing that it’s a trick in self-deception. It’s as though I came here searching for something, but found everything else except it. If someone else is feeling the same, just know that you are not alone in this predicament. And if someone else made it out from theirs, do let me know how you did that.

But all hope is not lost. I read Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ recently. And a quote from it sums up my situation. To paraphrase, “I was halfway across (…), at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.” I would like to think I have time to do things. That it is too early for me to be so cynical about these matters. That there is so much that can be done and so much I hope I actually will do. With this in mind, I suppose I must give time some time.

I look back on the pictures in my camera roll, accumulated from friends’ phones, drive links, Whatsapp shares and what not, much like the bonds that I made with them, from random hellos to coincidental run-ins, from society meetings, to friends introducing each other. I see messy hair (mostly mine), crooked smiles, poor lighting, and strange poses. They are not perfect. But it feels as though they are.

I am conflicted about how to conclude this article. Two quotes call out to me. One from my ever-so-dear ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’.

“…I know there are people who say all these things don’t happen. And there are people who forget what it’s like to be 16 when they turn 17. I know these will all be stories someday. And our pictures will become old photographs. We’ll all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now these moments are not stories…This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive, and you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song and that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear, we are infinite.”

The other is from ‘On The Road’.

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”

Truth be told, my emotional compass lies somewhere between the two. I can’t pretend I’m as hopeful and delighted as Charlie in the monologue, nor can I claim to be as cynical as Sal in the latter quote. Farewell will take place soon. I will take tons of pictures. I will make even more memories. I will be delighted in how messy we all shall look. But as far as sharing my memories is concerned, I shall reserve my judgement, for I can’t claim to forge a joy I can’t feel.

Years from now, on a dreary office weekday, sitting in strange lands, across different time-zones, if you come across a notification that I shared pictures from years gone by, of moments half-forgotten, just know that it is not a silly attempt at gaining attention, it is me finally understanding why things happened the way they did. And that, at that point in time, I truly said farewell to this phase of my life.