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ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
Dear Dad,
Hi. Maybe I could just text you, or give you a ring. I know you love when I facetime you while I’m walking around campus so I can flip the camera and show you a glimpse of the leaves changing color or the snow falling in Ann Arbor. Something about letters just seems more right. Something about writing has always felt right. I know that of all people, you will understand that.
The other day I got pretty anxious over turning an assignment in on time. I awaited, nearly craved the overwhelming relief and pride and weightlessness of pressing submit… but it didn’t come. It all felt pretty arbitrary after I submitted it. The mediocre confetti swam across my Canvas page and I saw myself in the reflection of my laptop screen. I looked unfamiliar. Maybe in pictures or in the mirror we see ourselves with a different perspective than those in this very room with me right now, watching me hastily type away at a rectangle on the table in front of me. That new holiday Starbucks sugar cookie iced coffee is condensating the aged wood of the desk and my fingers rapidly click; I’m too zoned in to have any sort of control over the way I’m smiling or any part of the expression on my face. I didn’t like what I looked like in the reflection of my laptop screen after I submitted whatever assignment I was submitting. Like always, I quickly opened Spotify and switched to a serotonin-boosting song. I figured switching up the soundtrack to this academically-induced melancholy would make me feel a bit less anxious over the whole thing. Without even saying what I switched my music to, I’m sure you can guess. I scrolled through one of my new playlists and immediately to the band that has gotten me through pretty much everything I have ever and will ever experience (not to over exaggerate). “Across the Universe” by The Beatles immediately made me hyper aware of everything around me. I felt the vibrating airpods blasting Paul and John through whatever auditory brain mechanisms allow us to hear music. I felt this wave of calm wash over me; I’m occupying this space in a seat in the South U Starbucks and I quickly felt young and old at the very same time. Suddenly, I was thinking fifteen years ahead to a shoebox apartment in Greenwich Village and fifteen years back to the sweet serenity of childhood naivete.
Remember when I was really young and I’d fall asleep on the couch watching what probably was The Little Mermaid or Aladdin for the thousandth time and you would carry me upstairs to my bed? There was always something incredibly comforting about falling asleep on the couch with no worry in the world that I would wake up the next morning in my bed. It felt magical in a way, despite being subconsciously aware of the journey from point A to B. Deep down, I knew that it wasn’t teleportation or some magical Disney-powered carpet ride; I knew you would carry me through the kitchen and up the stairs and across the hallway to get to my room. Somehow, this never really occurred to me until I got a bit older. Until I really ever thought about it, I just had unconditional trust that you would get me where I needed to be. I admit, there were even times I feigned being asleep, but was secretly in that in-between twilight of dreamy awareness. I miss feeling safe like that all the time, but I think that’s what has to happen when you grow too tall to be carried up the stairs to bed.
Isn’t it strange that being carried up to bed as a child is such a universal experience? It makes me really think about what it means to be a child. It makes me reconsider growing up as a mechanism to make money and instead as a method of learning to feel safe without your dad carrying you up the stairs to bed. It’s like this: when I saw my reflection on the laptop screen and I felt a lot emptier than the over-achiever, eager nerd I have always been, I started rethinking a lot. I thought about space and the ability to coexist within an entire universe of other people paving their own way and figuring out their own shit, but all collectively just being in the same place at the same time. Like this Starbucks. The girl next to me has a giant nursing textbook and this man just walked over to the line to order a triple shot of espresso. People are cool and I feel like we don’t appreciate that enough. I know you do, actually. We have always been similarly wired that way.
Maybe it’s because, like you, I am trapped in a world drawn by the right side of my brain. I’ve never thought in numbers and failed to find joy and wisdom in musty math or physics textbooks. Life, from my perspective, has been far less of a string of chemical reactions and calculated, kinesthetic movements and far more of a narrative in which I play the protagonist and battle and bask with the beasts and in the beauty of the world around me. Space is important. Not space in terms of the endless abyss of stars and planets and whatever other extraterrestrial vernacular I could throw in to sound cool, but space in terms of the environment we as humans or we as dialogue or we as entities occupy at any given moment.
What’s even more interesting is the way in which space appears to change around us. The very same room can start as a stranger, become a place of comfort, and then return to being a stranger all within the confines of a year. Classrooms are like that. You walk into your first day of fourth grade with a brand new backpack of colored pencils and blank loose-leaf filled binders and you enter an entirely new world. More quickly than feels natural, it becomes a second home. Then, the year ends and time passes and the colored pencils all get lost at the bottom of your bag (I always lose the blue pencils first for some reason). Sometimes, things become permanent entities but continue to evolve in the role they play in your life. Ann Arbor has definitely become more of my home than just the place where I go to school. I wake up refreshed by the view of the Big House from my apartment window and I go to sleep calmed by the college calamity of cheap alcohol and late night Pizza House feta bread. I love and hate this constantly changing world around me and it is for this reason I am even more thankful to cling to the incomparable comfort of being carried up to bed.
You and mom have established a home that balances crazy with comfort and taught me that love feels like always knowing that even in the darkest, lowest moments, I’ll always have someone to carry me up to bed. Youth has a way of tricking you into looking for safety in people of authority; school principals and camp counselors are generally interested in your well-being, but the crux of human safety does not reside within the plethora of adult figures that enter and exit our lives with the purpose of ensuring we don’t dive into shallow pools or run with scissors. As I’ve gotten older, as I stared at my unfamiliar reflection in the submitted screen of my MacBook Air, I now understand what safety really feels like. It’s the warmth underneath the blanket on our couch at home and the smell of Nanny’s Mandel bread wafting through our Holiday-decorated house. It’s everything bagels with Wawa coffee on a Jersey Shore Sunday morning. More than anything else, safety for me will always be music by The Beatles. That is all thanks to you. Through everything I have ever been through, I have Paul, John, George, and Ringo. When I don’t know who I am or who I am supposed to be and when I no longer have New Jersey bagels on hand, I can close my eyes and drift away Across the Universe into the musical manifestation of some sort of magical, somehow safe psychedelic xanax. The world around me could be literally engulfed in flames of unread Political Science textbooks, unanswered text messages, misunderstood moments and somehow Paul will begin to make it better.
The problems that force me to turn to my Fab Four nowadays are obviously much more headache-inducing than those I faced as a child or even throughout high school, but you’ve always reminded me that there will always be problems, and we should just be thankful for being handed problems we can solve. This perspective, like a lot of your life lessons, is founded in music and movies. I learned the importance of laughter and the absolute incapability of being normal in a family like ours through Mel Brooks just as I learned to tie my shoes in those helper books with laces inside. Admittedly, I still only know how to tie my shoes in bunny ears and like my utter inability to tell a story from point A to B without exploring more tangents than there are shoelaces in my closet, I have accepted it as a product of my familial upbringing. In other words, it is all thanks to you and mom for impressing upon the abnormal… or Abby Normal, as Mel Brooks would say.
I miss the days where I called you “Prince Eric” and genuinely believed I was Princess Ariel despite my permanent human legs and blonde curly hair telling me otherwise. I miss being carried up to bed after falling asleep on the couch. I know that being young is synonymous with naive in many ways and that as we get older we’re supposed to be able to walk up the stairs on our own to bed; we’re supposed to call people by their normal or preferred names; we are meant to fall more deeply into whatever mold society has established for us at whatever given age bracket we exist in. Despite the fact that age is merely a biological marker for the rate at which our bodies grow and change, I reject the sentiment of developing psychologically or socially on some predetermined timeline. Maybe I’ve watched too many Woody Allen movies or read too many coming-of-age novels to accept that I am meant to fall in love and get married and live in a suburb somewhere at the same time I am also meant to establish a successful career in something that both makes me happy and makes me money. I have decided to live, as The Beatles have, as you and mom have, on whatever timeline I draw for myself.
I think I’ve missed the marker to become a global music icon in a mop-top British band by 20-years-old or to get married at 21-years-old. Instead, I’ll continue writing sappy nighttime poems, drinking far too much coffee, and paying careful attention to the undulations of the weather in Ann Arbor and the laughter of my roommates. College didn’t immediately give me that sense of comfort and security in the same way that New Jersey summer time ever will, but I think that finding this new sense of home in somewhere so far away is part of the process. After all, because of you, I’ll have a built-in safety blanket wherever I go and through whatever I do: the Beatles.
Call you later,
Jess