The Home Stretch: Candles and Cramming

I’m living the worst of college stereotypes: the dreaded finals week. I can confirm they are just as notorious as the movies claim. I struggle to remember during these stressful times that this school is a privilege to attend. Even if that means in some twisted sense it is also a privilege to visibly sag from lack of sleep and pull my hair out, so be it.

Finals carry with them a presence as obvious as the descending fog. There is a sort of art to the crazed look college students give off during this time. It is fascinating to see my peers fighting off the weight of the world, all with the quivering corners of a fake smile. People enter finals week like squad groups entering a war. First the sciences are released into the fray. One can tell by the sort of people that sit huddled and on edge in the lounge. They appear to be gathered in prayer, and in a way they are. Their notes appear sewn like a tablecloth across the surface, sacrifices to the study gods. They scribble on the board as if they had but minutes to decode a bomb.

I was caught in the next wave, the quiet suffering the humanities know best. As the sciences prepare for the battle of the sit down final, humanities majors fight a war of attrition in the production of essay after essay. The war is raged against oneself. Never has the world looked so beautiful as in the week I couldn’t allow myself to enter it. Under self imposed lock down, I felt myself decaying away, reloading with the occasional fizzy drink and refreshing with short study buddy complaining sessions.

Two friends and I have a mini cramming tradition. We are still in search of a name, but to us it is a new Dead Poets Society, the bond of friendship and the assurance of collected knowledge spun into the symbolism of a candle in the middle of sprawled notes and the progression of the night. The city calls, but we have each other as skyscrapers. Only with each other do our fake smiles become real. 

So finals are brutal. But does that mean there is no beauty to be found in the end of my first semester of college? The end of the semester is for rumination as well. One last dosage of suffering perhaps, but also the realization that I wouldn’t trade a single part of the past four months. We forget, like so many people fighting battles do, that there is something worth fighting for. As I look around me, at the friends gathered around the electric candlelight, I realize that friendship is more beautiful than the city I’m in. And we all suffer but we are all together, comrades in the same battle to better our lives.

 I couldn’t ask for a more perfect end. A semester with a red bridge, but more importantly with bridges built between friends. A semester that sometimes felt like the sudden stops and swinging of the public transportation, but with so many worthwhile destinations. So I lost a little sleep and a little hair. A small price to pay for the culmination of my first glorious semester.