Forever, it goes on

After a long shift of cleaning carts and bagging groceries, my voice tired from repeating, “Welcome to Trader Joe’s!” loud enough to be heard through my mask, I burst through the front door of my apartment. Sensing my frantic, pent-up energy from a stressful but monotonous day, my housemate suggests we go for a walk. As we meander slowly through campus, I am struck with the strangest sensation.

I feel like a 40-year-old returning to campus after a long hiatus, waxing poetic about my days as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.

“Oh, Dwinelle, you tangled mess,” I shout, remembering my anxious quest to find my French GSI’s office hours sophomore year, and instead discovering the beautiful Ishi Court. “I miss you!”

Stopping for a moment to stand on the seal between the Moffitt and Doe Libraries, we gaze into the darkened floors below empty chairs and tables. I realise the irony — it’s the Wednesday of dead week and the campus is actually dead. In another world, there would be thousands of students staring into books and screens under fluorescent lights, desperately packing life-altering knowledge into coffee-riddled brains. I would probably be 20 feet below, deep in the caverns of Main Stacks, watching the hours tick by deep into the night. Now, staring up at Doe Memorial Library’s looming columns, R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” plays from the portable speaker on my hip.

We continue past the monstrosity of Evans Hall, where my honors thesis cohort and I spent three long, hot hours every week packed into the smallest, windowless basement classroom, questioning if our four years here had truly prepared us to write a yearlong research paper. Even if I could have predicted that I would travel to Senegal to do research and write more than 100 pages of nuanced prose on decolonial social movements, I never imagined submitting it by email in the middle of a global pandemic.

With the campus quiet and windows dark, the bright white glow of the Campanile beckons us closer. My housemate, a sophomore with more semesters of virtual learning ahead of her, asks me where I think I spent the most time on campus. I respond immediately — Zellerbach Hall. I regale stories of the late nights spent building pools on stage and the afternoon naps in a hammock I hung in the rafters. Despite the fact that I haven’t been inside since my sophomore year, the laughs, tears and the people I shared them with will never leave me.

We pass LeConte Hall, where my mother and I sat in on a graduate business class, thinking it was English 45A, on my high school visit to UC Berkeley. After three hours of sitting in a hardwood chair and taking notes on desks that were too small, I couldn’t wait to do this daily. I knew I would love it.

But my time at UC Berkeley cannot be described as love. As I feel it does to a lot of its students, UC Berkeley grabbed me and every preconception I had about myself, my place and the world, and shook it all up. My sophomore year I took a total of 57 units, sacrificing my social life and mental health for reasons I cannot even remember. My junior year I ran away, leaving the country for the first time and discovering who I was without the stress and anxiety this university brought out in me. When I returned for one last year, I instead spent my mornings running through the Berkeley Hills, long afternoons baking in the sun on Memorial Glade, sunsets laughing at Indian Rock Park and late nights strolling down Durant Avenue. For all of its misery, my four years at UC Berkeley have taught me how to think critically about the world and also about myself. About taking time for people as well as work, for fresh air as well as libraries and for just being present and alive.

My housemate and I slowly walk up to the Campanile, turning our gaze higher and higher, brick by brick, until its shining beacon is the size of the full moon which hangs beside it in the night sky. We stop on the steps beneath the tower, dancing and laughing, high on the night air and on a unique feeling of aloneness. As our giggles subside, we sit, looking down the long hill, past the edge of campus, barely able to make out the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge across the Bay.

“Wow, it kind of goes on forever, doesn’t it?” she says, referring to the view. I’m quiet, applying her comment not to the infinite picture of land and sea before us, but to my time at this university and its unceremonious end.

From my readings to my discussions, to the lifelong friends I’ve made to the professors who shaped the way I think, UC Berkeley has prepared me to think critically and practically about the world. It has also given me the creativity to imagine a more just and equal future, skills that are of the utmost importance in the ever-changing conditions of our present. Though my classmates and I won’t walk across the stage of the Hearst Greek Theatre this May, and though we are graduating into the most unstable future in recent history, I still look back on my time here with gratitude.

“Yeah,” I reply, hoping that when I’m 40 years old, I remember the lessons I learned here and the person I grew to be. “It really does go on forever.”