Marquette University Intimations Project

Anonymous

The Outlook ping vibrated my phone, and the phones of everyone around me. It was a ping that we had been anticipating but holding out hope that we wouldn’t receive. I was sitting on the ground surrounded by friends and I cautiously looked at the subject line in an attempt to conceal any emotion my face would convey. Up until this point we were so blissfully optimistic, and that optimism soon turned into naivety. It had barely started to set in that nobody’s lives were going to be untouched by this pandemic. Soon would come the moment we would understand these emails were not going to stop any time soon. They were going to be our new normal, though normal still feels generous. The collective silence still resides in me to this day. Needless to say, I will never overlook the power of human connection again. 

My phone vibrates with texts from everywhere 

“did u hear about school?” 

“…uhm I just got the email”

“It’s okay we are only off for a few weeks and then we will be back.” 

“did you sign up for a time to grab stuff from our dorm room?” 

“do you think there will still be graduation?” 

“I am coming home from abroad before I can’t get back” 

“I want to see you before we have to go into lockdown” 

“how are you doing? scale of 1-10” 

The Outlook ping vibrated my phone. From the upside down position I was in – sprawling my legs on the headrest of my chair while my hands were on the ground – I could see my phone light up from a few feet away. I could tell it was an email from my professor and I assumed he was reminding us to watch our pre-recorded lectures and answer the corresponding questions by the

end of the day… I ignored it and continued to lay upside down. My quarantine brain fog convinced me if I was laying upside down, my new perspective of the room I was in would give me some motivation to make a dent in the 10 things due by the end of the day. That was not the case. Instead, I did some yoga and turned on Netflix. 

I am ruthlessly shaken awake by my little brother. With a mischievous grin on his face, he presents a paint brush in one hand and paint in the other. It was not even 8 am before he told me he had run out of paper so he was going to be using my face as his canvas for art class that day. I reluctantly submitted to this request, unwilling to pick a fight at that hour. Let’s be honest- what else was I really going to do that day? Unfortunately for me, that was not the last day my face fell victim to his paint. 

My phone vibrated with a notification from my doorbell, alerting me that the mail had been delivered. I begrudgingly threw off the blankets that I had been wrapped in all day and walked downstairs to the front door where I was met with the blinding sun. I grabbed the mail and tossed it on my counter. A few minutes later came a knock at my door- it was my brother handing me a couple of envelopes. I had mail… I had mail? Perplexed, I tore open the envelopes to find handwritten letters stuffed inside, accompanied by a notecard that was filled with funny memories signed from my friend. Immediately, the biggest smile consumed my face and I was taken back to this familiar feeling of excitement when receiving mail as a child. The letter writing never stopped. In fact, it was one of the only reliable constants throughout the following months. 

The Outlook ping vibrated my phone. I picked it up only to read the first line of the email where someone yet again opened it with, “I hope this email finds you well during this unprecedented time.” and then continued on with a massive list of extraneous tasks to complete by the end of the week. 

As the days grew longer, I found myself hung up on the same question – “Who do you want to be in the world?” I felt as though I should have been able to come up with an answer, but in all honesty, had absolutely no idea how. This was a question I was asked the last “normal” day, pre-covid lockdown, and something about my inability to define myself in that very moment became what I laid awake at night pondering. 

My phone was in constant vibration, it was always within my fingers’ reach. I was living notification to notification, desperately holding on to the last “normal” moments, the last “normal” conversations, and the last “normal” days. I struggled to fill the hours in my days. I had never had so much time on my hands, and so much choice in what to do with it. My social media was littered with ways to improve yourself with all of this newly allotted time. My phone was constantly blowing up with daunting news updates. My days were filled with school and my nights filled with the black hole of social media that expanded into the early hours of the next day. Everything seemed to be revolving around the device that resided in my hand by day and rested next to my bed at night, but had no issue jolting me awake at any hour. 

The Outlook ping vibrated my phone. It was a zoom link for a virtual friday night with my friend group. The invite read, “let’s have a virtual dance party!” This prompted me to jump off my couch and change into clothes other than pajamas for the first time in weeks. You would think that having not seen each other for the most time we had ever been apart we would have so much to say. But when the dancing was done, we all fell silent. There was an ominous weight that no words can accurately describe. It was as if we all wanted to say something but didn’t know how to say it until my one friend spoke up and said, “it is really hard to put feelings into actual words when there isn’t one word for what you are feeling.” I think we all try not to take words for granted anymore. 

Shortly after that call, I started a collaborative running list titled, “The little things that make us whole” At the top of the list one of my friends wrote: The stories I share with each of you beautiful people. That is when I realized that we were all mourning time; time in all of our stories was often a fixed concept, but we were now tasked with experiencing it away from each other in different manners. When time was warping our days and memories, it was this seemingly small electronic list that kept us connected and grounded. Soon it became filled with moments, pictures, precious memories, and stories that filled up our friendships; it became kind of like a love letter to each other. Whether it be an intimate moment or a memory that we thought was locked away but managed to resurface and made us keel over in laughter, this list continues to reignite the feeling of abundant love every time we read it. That mutual feeling of togetherness in a time where we felt worlds apart from everyone else in our lives still lives within me. Our shared stories created an unbreakable link between us that was the singular entity we could entrust to hold the colossal weight we were all carrying. 

When you are stripped of the things that you believe define you, that you believe fill up the spaces in your life that need to be filled, you are forced to reevaluate a lot. One of the greatest changes in my life in the last year is my welcoming of space. I no longer feel constrained by the excessive amount of tasks I had previously filled every day with. I am no longer living from one snapshot to the next. I am living in the in-between and learning to appreciate that space. Rather than fill up every moment I have in each day with unnecessary things, why not take the space for myself? I came to understand that accepting that space would allow me to be more intentional with my actions and be more present in my days. 

I look at my creative journal often to remind myself of all the days that I have taken the time to welcome the empty space, to reflect on the stories that have had profound impacts on me, and taken the time to let the people in those stories know how important they are to me. I look back at my FaceTime history often to remind myself of how important, even in the midst of a global pandemic, we found it was to share stories with others. I look at my FaceTime history and remember the stories that were told – sometimes over the course of a 3 hour long facetime and even in the ones that were only 3 minutes. I remember the stories that had to be told from states apart – sometimes consumed by tears, other times consumed by belly aching laughter. Human connection is indispensable to who we are. In an effort to be more present in every moment, I have become more intentional within those connections. It astounds me that one small interaction that I might have brushed off or discounted as unimportant can be deeply interwoven into someone else’s most crucial story. Stories are what have bound us together for the past year, but intentionality and presence are what allowed those stories a space to grow, prosper, and heal. 

So you might be asking yourself, “Who does she want to be in the world?” and truthfully, there are a lot of things I want to be. I don’t need all of the answers right at this moment. It’s not an inability to define myself, but a refusal to confine myself to one specific answer. If this last year has taught me anything, it is that things will absolutely change and there will undoubtedly be unforeseen challenges. Sometimes those challenges aren’t deterring us from who we are supposed to be. Sometimes they are just giving us the necessary room to shift course a little bit. 

All that being said, no matter what I do in life, I do know that I want to lead with being intentional with my time to ensure that I am fully present in every moment. I don’t want to overlook the magnitude of the little joys or the stories that others choose to share with me: those moments that the earth paints magical pictures of in the sky when the moonlight reflects off of the stars, for the breathtakingly beautiful sunrises on top of the parking garage, for the picnics in the trunks of our cars parked 6 feet apart at the beach on warm June nights, for the moments when you lock eye contact with a stranger behind a mask longing to capture the gaze of another human being. I want to value these moments as much as the biggest moments in my life so that I can continue to tell these stories with complete integrity, because even though they might seem small, they are important in their own way. 

The world is full of an abundance of stories around corners that you don’t even see until you are willing to look up. This year has given me the space to learn to love sharing stories of the places I’ve grown to call home, the people who make me whole, and my own pivotal moments. So I am determined not to overlook the little moments, the ones that you expect to be there, because I’ve also learned those are the moments that will shock you with the depth they hold if you are willing to give them the chance. When you eliminate the background noise, you are able to focus on those faint echoes that were once impossible for your brain to trace – the echoes that when given the room to be heard, will reflect the things that you love deeply.