beautiful moments by CJ Q. '23

i’ve been so busy and sad and angry about everything lately, that it’s been harder to notice the nice and pretty things in life:

sailing on the charles, noticing how the smallest shifts in seating rock the boat, the tension of not-quite-capsizing,

square dancing, the joy i get when working together with other dancers to compute moves while walking to the beat,

the other bloggers, and the zany meetings we have, and when we’re together i feel the strength of each personality taking up space in the conference room,

being in the esp office in the late afternoon, opening the doors to see the lights turned off and people napping, sitting on a couch next to a friend i know’s been busy recently, napping peacefully, and taking a picture and sending it to him to tease him,

reminiscing about the time i spent a whole day bouncing on and off trains with a friend, two years ago now, and sharing those memories with someone else,

working with others in the sipb office on programming projects, seeing students younger than me excited about things i wish i was excited about, eating pizza and drinking soda in our tiny hackathon,

being in splash, the first in-person splash in three years, and watching those younger students with their parents a few feet behind them encouraging their child to talk to us to check in, watching older students smiling widely when they get to put pronoun stickers on their nametags, sitting in help desk and trying to let my smile show through my mask as i give people directions,

walking to the 26-100 stage, our largest lecture hall, the av tech handing me the microphone and talking about cardioids, and holding that microphone while talking to dozens of high schoolers about ridiculous survival scenarios,

playing spirit island with friends on a friday afternoon in our weekly tradition, where we keep talking about that web app we’ll never build, then teaching spirit island to some splash students two days later, and watching them plan and plan over the best thing to do only minutes later, how fast they learn the game,

eating out with a friend group that hasn’t been together in a while, and still isn’t completely together, but you gotta take the victories when they come, at that japanese barbecue place in harvard we’ve been to lots, where we’re now old enough to order alcohol than when we last went together, four years ago,

and going to a practice room in building 4, where some play piano and others sing, as we ticked the hours past sitting around and singing songs from yesteryear, the same way we did four years ago, except now we are drunk, and when we sang industry baby someone made a joke about how we’re all industry babies now, applying to jobs and signing offers and in a few cases going to grad school,

we are all old, now, and i understand what fun meant when they wrote we are young, i felt like i regressed a few years that night, in that way you only realize how cold you are once you’re warmer, and last night and last weekend and last week when i pay attention i realize how old i’ve been feeling, desensitized to these beautiful moments, like i once feared i’ll become,

a silent oath i told myself, all those years ago, that i’d never stop being grateful for my life, a promise broken, a vow i’ll strive to never break again.