tick tock tick tock by Boheng C. '28

the end of a semester at MIT is a time of juxtaposition. it is a time of delight and sadness, of triumph and melancholia; it is a fast time and a slow time; it is a time of midnight doomerism and late afternoon euphoria, of frivolity and sudden fatalism and jubilation alike.

and so the semester comes to an end. classes hold their last lectures one by one. many people realize that they have far too many dining hall meal swipes left. they organize dinners where they swipe in their friends one by one, sometimes twenty or thirty or forty friends at a time. they return from the dining halls bearing styrofoam boxes piled high with sandwiches and pasta and cookies and ice cream and leave the boxes in the kitchen, to the gluttonous delight of all.

and so the semester comes to an end. a handful of people are graduating or moving out. when they realize the inevitable — that their worldly possessions will never be crammed into a handful of moving boxes — they begin to sell their clothes and furniture and appliances on dormspam⁠01 a mailing list to which most undergraduates are subscribed<br /> . they donate their belongings, leave them on free item and reuse shelves, send them off to clothing drives. some wardrobes and desks fill up; others empty out; all participants of the same cycle of life that student belongings have endured since time immemorial.

and so the semester comes to an end. snow falls, first in tentative drifts and then all at once, accumulating in fat piles streaked with mud and grass. puddles freeze and become hard translucent mirrors; facilities workers cover the sidewalks with layers and layers of turquoise road salt in a perpetual crusade against ice. not even the steam tunnels beneath campus are immune from the inexorable advance of cold. 

and so the semester comes to an end. my sleep schedule stretches back and forth until it gets distorted beyond recognition; everyone’s sleep schedule stretches back and forth until it gets distorted beyond recognition. no longer is sleep constrained by the mere bounds of day or night.

and so the semester comes to an end. my window, having been tormented by a semester’s worth of wind and rain, begins to have trouble staying shut. my friends and i lock ourselves out of a door; we use a coat hanger to pry open the latch. as per weekly tradition, my friend group gathers in a first-floor classroom and we take turns telling stories into the wee hours of the night; a few of my friends, instead of telling their story, drink a cup of soy milk at the front of the classroom before wordlessly leaving through the window⁠02 to this day i still have no clue why they did that .

and so the semester comes to an end. my floormates depart one by one, each one after they finish the last of their finals, departing for train stations and airports. the hammering and drilling noises that once haunted my floor slowly fade away, as projects are quietly abandoned for january. lounges, once hubs of psetting and riotous 3 am conversation, die down without fanfare and are occupied by just a few people, mired in last-minute studying or silently watching movies until dawn. kitchens also depopulate; tupperwares in fridges are slowly removed or thrown out; condiment shelves are set aside for the spring. the dorm gets quieter and quieter, fewer and fewer windows are illuminated at night, until only a handful of weary stragglers remain over winter break.

and so the semester comes to an end.

in the last few weeks of the semester, classes end one by one like toppling dominoes. the first to fall are always the ones without finals; most of these classes have final projects that we submit during the last or second-to-last lecture. then come the finals, spread over a week or, if you’re unlucky, concentrated on just one or two days. the moment that each class ends is one of accomplishment; it signals an emancipation from a responsibility, one less thing to burden your thoughts, one more thing vanquished for good and rightfully relegated to transcripts or class registration histories.

and yet, it all felt so incomplete this time.

for me, the first class to end was my spanish class, or 21g.707 (graphic stories: spanish and latin american comics). the night before the last lecture, i stayed up late to draw the comic that was my final project. at 9:30 pm, i returned to my dorm room from dinner and sat down, grimly aware of the magnitude of the task that was before me; at 10 pm, i began pencil sketching the next few panels of the comic, continuing the work that i had left half-finished from thanksgiving break and which had sat untouched on my desk for a week afterwards; at 11:30 pm, having drafted a page, i proceeded to doomscroll for an hour; at 12:30 am, i inexplicably began reading a novel; at 1:15 am, i finally resumed drawing; at 2 am, i got distracted again and scrolled tumblr; at 2:30 am, i decided to look at the rubric for the comic and discovered, to my horror, that there were a couple of vocabulary and grammar requirements for the comic’s text that i had forgotten about; at 2:45 am, having recovered from my shock, i slowly began inserting imperatives and subjunctive clauses into the dialogue; at 4:30 am, most of the grammatical deficiencies had been repaired and i continued onwards with sketching; at 5:00 am, i stumbled to the kitchen to microwave a bowl of instant ramen; at 6:00 am, after falling down a youtube rabbit hole, i began drawing the last page; at 7:00 am, the comic itself was done at last, at 7:30 am, i submitted everything after recording myself speak the comic; at 8:00 am, i promptly collapsed on my bed.

at 2:45 pm that afternoon, i entered class ten minutes late and i presented. and that was it. it didn’t feel like the end of anything. the last comic that we read together as a class had been nearly a month ago; the intervening four weeks were filled with exam review, an in-class essay, thanksgiving break, a test. the gasping embers of the class simply simmered out over the course of a protracted month; there were too many individual lasts, too many ends for the final end to feel like much.

in the next few days, i kept instinctively logging into canvas and clicking on the schedule for the class to find out what we were doing next lecture before i realized that no, it was all over and had been all over. but there wasn’t much time to think about a class that might or might not have ended, since i was immediately thrust into my final essay for 24.906 (linguistic study of bilingualism) due in three days. i crammed half a semester of writing in the rest of the week, writing in lounges and in my room and in the dining hall and in various third- and fourth-floor nooks around campus; writing in the afternoon, night, late night until dawn; writing in front of the student center at 2 am; writing and writing until the rising saturday morning sun cast building 54 in hues of orange and dappled gold.

yet this essay also ended up being a loose untied end to the semester. i submitted a live link to it instead of the document itself, hoping to finish the last section after the deadline but before the essay could be graded⁠03 if you’re a professor or ta for this class, pretend you never saw anything . sadly, i never got around to writing during the invariably underestimated end-of-year rush, and the essay ended as inconclusively as did the class.

then there was the last weekend of the semester, replete with a capella concerts and snowstorms and interminable seas of practice finals. my finals themselves were mostly uneventful. they were clouded by sleep deprivation and a general sense of miasma, as always, and i took a few naps during my one afternoon final after fatigue finally conquered my drooping eyelids. i didn’t have time to catch up to a few of the lectures i missed towards the end for each of my classes, so i was a bit clueless about spin states and terrestrial carbon sinks during the finals. i feel bad that i didn’t give these classes the opportunity to properly conclude, to go to the lectures until the very end and to hear my professors talk about quantum key distributions or the ozone hole until the final round of applause from the audience.

over the past few years, i’ve found it increasingly hard to accept the end of things. two years ago, it seemed as if high school would be eternal, and that i would attend six classes a day with the same group of friends for perpetuity, until it all just ended one day. it seemed as if i would live in the same small corner of los angeles for eternity, surrounded by palm trees and parched grassy hills and contrail-streaked cerulean skies, until it all just ended one day. it seemed as if each semester of MIT would be forever, the weekly rhythm of classes and recitations stretching into the far distance, until it all just ended one day.

today i turn 20. i suppose that’s an ending in and of itself — an end to my teenage years, an end to my second decade of partaking in the strange inexplicable experience of being alive. i only realized this two weeks ago, and i wondered to myself how i would spend my last two weeks of being a teenager, how i would conserve and savor and relish the little time that remained. in the end, i didn’t end up doing anything special. i did barely anything to reminisce, or to commemorate or even just to acknowledge the inevitable end. as the clocks chimed midnight yesterday and the sun set on another decade of my life, nothing happened at all. time just flowed on and on and on.