Graduation
Written in September 2013
May 12, 2013: At 7:06 a.m. on graduation morning, I came to the scariest realization I have ever made: every single progressive thing I have done — mastering Chopin, attempting to play club soccer, helping little children in Honduras realize their education potential, you get it, everything to “build” this person that I manufactured and sold as the Kaelyn Malkoski to colleges across the country — and every decision my parents had made — moving the family to a Chicago suburb from Cincinnati, living within District 181 because it had a strong public school system, forcing me to be on 8th grade math team (even though I couldn’t solve a geometric proof for my life) — culminated in this very day. Everything I had worked for my entire life was done so that I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree. And this day was finally here.
Naturally, I freaked out at the thought of this life-shattering revelation. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a girl who had barely slept two hours the night before, a girl with an alcohol-induced swollen face wearing a knee-length T-shirt with a 3-foot wiener dog’s face on the front. Holy shit, world, I thought. I am not ready for you.
I checked my cellphone only to discover my most recent Internet searches as of 3:38 a.m. “james taylor. carolina in my mind. commencement start time. commencement unc. graduation, vitamin c. how to freeze time. what happens if you sleep through graduation.” Jesus. Then I found my best friend of four years, my roommate and my partner-in-crime, Katheryn, laying in my bathtub, chugging water and crying. She had already vomited on the deck outside this morning. We’re seriously graduating college?
I had neither a plan nor incentive to ever leave my current state of euphoric being. I loved the magical bubble I lived in; Chapel Hill, N.C., represented the epitome of carefree. It was a place where I knew everything about everyone, a place where the biggest decision each day was to get a turkey-bacon-guacamole on hearty grain bread sandwich from Merritt’s, a historical gas station turned frequented lunch spot, or a Time Out chicken cheddar biscuit for lunch. I loved my friends — my crazy, idiosyncratic friends — but most of all, I loved myself. I loved who I was in this happy place. I never wanted to leave.
So at 7:13 a.m., instead of confronting reality, I went downstairs to join the rest of my roommates, who were already ripping shots of Jim Beam and gyrating to Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” on repeat. Like I said, my friends were crazy and idiosyncratic, and they were also weird. Collectively, we had an obsession — borderline fetish, pretty much — for wearing headpieces, masks and wigs just for the hell of it. Obviously Halloween was a given, but we’d also wear Big Bird and Cookie Monster headpieces just to make pancakes for dinner or to drive through South campus and wave to the people waiting at the Morrison bus stop or to get froyo. We thought dumb shit like this was funny.
Saying this, it was no surprise on graduation morning when I walked into the kitchen I found my friends and fellow confidants mid-shot and wearing their respective costumes — the horse head, Scooby Doo, a green pixie bob, a rainbow Afro, Cookie Monster and Papa Smurf. My friend, Reid, too, was wearing a red kimono and glitter. Why would I graduate in baby blue when red is my color? he said. All of this made me smile, and I ran back upstairs to don the Big Bird headpiece, my signature look. Sure, we were going to graduate, but we were going to do it like this.
We were a bit tipsy when the hodgepodge of family members started to arrive circa 8:30 a.m. to walk to the commencement ceremony. Many of them (the grandparents, especially!) were confused as to why we were in half-costume on our graduation day, the pinnacle of our education career. I think Phoebe and Anna’s parents were angry (we were, after all, ruining prime photo opportunities, dammit). But I know my parents, although they didn’t explicitly say anything, were more than proud. I know this because my Dad started snapping pictures on his Blackberry, something he only does when he wants to capture odd and exciting moments worth documenting, like the people at the world’s largest international pet products convention in Vegas. And then Mom looked at me, surveying my choice of graduation attire and said, “Only you. Only you.” And then, “I love you.”
We made our way to the stadium and sat through what might be the world’s most boring and irrelevant commencement speech. I don’t even know who spoke — I think it was the guy who invented AOL, which would’ve been cool eight years ago — but all I retained was that he loved Detroit. Besides having a shitty speaker who had a questionable fixation for a town I found rather mediocre, I had many other issues with our commencement ceremony. For example, why it was at 9 a.m. in the football stadium under the scorching sun was beyond me. We all had pit stains in our floor-length gowns, and I’m pretty sure Katheryn got up more than once to puke. I had started crying before any of the speakers came to the platform and well before the Clef Hangers sang their rendition of James Taylor’s “Carolina in my Mind.” Although I was initially regretting wearing the Big Bird headpiece due to the copious amounts of sweat it was causing me to produce, I was ultimately quite thankful I had it to wipe up all of my tears.
At graduation, my friends and I stuck out like infected, sore thumbs. Although our neon green and cerulean blue and bright yellow clashed with the sea of Carolina blue, my dad later said it was “ingenious” because he and the rest of the parents were able to locate us almost instantly. Additionally, my freeriding guy friends were able to text their parents, “look for big bird,” and their parents found them pretty quickly too. And, the coolest part was that because we were the only kids in the stadium wearing cartoon and farm animal headpieces, we made it onto a few local papers’ websites and the Carolina Alumni Review magazine. Ironically, I had been trying to pitch a story to the Raleigh News & Observer for three years; on one of my very last days of existence in the greater Raleigh area, I got my five minutes of fame without even trying.
The rest of graduation day is a big, messy blur of awkward family photos, tears, running out of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s separate, smaller graduation ceremony because I was going to puke and/or pass out, tears, brunch at the Carolina Inn, hugging old people, more tears and Mom’s big, fat lesson on happiness.
Although at the moment it made me cry…and cry some more (and it still sometimes does, to this very day), I want to share it with you. It came right after dinner, when the alcohol and friends-induced euphoria had started to wear off and I had just a split second just think. This was it. It’s really over. And then it hit me. I started crying, uncontrollably, in a way I hadn’t done since the day I moved to Chapel Hill on August 14, 2009. I ran down the street, unable to stop running and highly capable of throwing myself in front of the nearest P2P transit bus. (Rumor had it, you got free tuition if it hit you while you were a student. What would I get now that I’ve graduated? A redo?) My mom caught up to me and shook me. “Kaelyn. You’ve got to stop. Listen to me.”
“What?” Nothing she could’ve said to me at that moment would’ve made it — this blaring concept of life, of the real world — okay. I started running again. When she finally got me, she pushed me down into a bench. “Listen.
“I get it. You’re happy. I’ve never seen you this happy before. But this happiness will come again. You can’t try to make it. You can’t be waiting for it. But I promise you, you will feel this way again in your life.”
Her words didn’t make me feel better; alternatively, they made me cry more. They didn’t fix the raw pain I felt, one that consumed every part of my body. And they most certainly didn’t remove the Scarlet letter of “college graduate” that I will be forced to wear for the rest of my life. But they’ve gotta be true, right?
I felt so alone, so scared and so certainly sure that I would never be this happy ever again. I was moving to Los Angeles in August — literally as far from Chapel Hill as I possibly could move — and knew a total of three people in the 500-mile region. All of my friends were moving to New York or to Charlotte, N.C., or to Washington, D.C., “easy” post-grad spots. My family lived in Chicago. I had pretended I was excited I was the Black Sheep of my friends, going out West and pursuing a dream, but all I felt was my throat closing in, the onset of a panic attack. What the hell was I doing?
Maybe I had something to prove to myself. Maybe I was looking to foster my weirdness. I didn’t know, but I did know that on graduation night I never, ever wanted to leave.
With my mother’s arms draped around my shoulders, we walked back to my house on Cameron Avenue. She kissed me goodnight and left me to enjoy one of my very last nights in the place I’ve only ever truly felt at home. I walked upstairs and went to the bathroom, stopping once again to look at myself in the same mirror I had stood in front of 12 hours ago. My eyes were still swollen and I still looked confused. I put the Big Bird headpiece back on and reevaluated myself. Again, I thought, Holy shit, world, I am not ready for you.” But then, looking at my 22-year-old self on the first day of the rest of her life, some internal switch flipped. “Holy shit, world, YOU are not ready for ME.