"Quarantine Navel Gazing" by Zola Gray (she/her)

August 5th, 2020 at 9:11pm

Travel light. That is the refrain of every email Kenyon College sends at the moment. This needs no explanation: travel light, in case we have to flee an outbreak.

Travel light. This is fairly straightforward: bring only the necessities and nothing superfluous. However, I don’t believe in “necessities” while traveling. I see value in the superfluous. For six months now, we have collectively lived a life based on necessity. In order to ensure maximum survival, we were living with the bare minimum of socializing to survive. So when Kenyon sent us its touch-and-go plan to bring as many students back as is safe, all I could think was that I am moving toward something again. I can see the horizon.

That being said, I am definitely being flagrant with my emotions. While I am aware of the risk under such uncertainty, I’ve realized I am no longer able to operate only from a place of self-preservation. I need to feel like I am looking forward to something, even if that thing can be taken from me at any moment. I completely understand padding on the pessimism to protect yourself from disappointment, but in order for me to feel hopeful about the future, I need to be able to take what is being offered to me by the institution I am a part of and believe they will carry through. I need to be able to daydream about that moment (in less than 15 days) when I will see the Kenyon sign and drive up the hill onto campus, when I will step out of the car and breathe the long exhale of relief at having made it to some sort of finish line.

That feeling, like so many things in this time, is unprecedented. I have never waited for something without knowing what shape the end would take, or been forced to accede to an indefinite unknown. As a result, I have never experienced anticipation like this: anticipation that has built beneath my floorboards, a pit of longing-entreaty-agitation unspooling and seeping through to tickle my toes any time I set my feet down. Alongside the medicinal benefits of hope, I’d be depriving myself of that, too.

Whisked up with the sense of motion I can feel my little ideas noisily erupting like the dormant volcanoes they are. I will be leaving home, setting out as an individual all over again and trying to regain lost ground. The promise (knock on wood because I’m definitely jinxing it) of change has reignited my desire to engage with my own in-bodied persona in a tangible way. What does it mean to be your own person with your own ideas? How seriously should you take yourself, especially now, when we all are deserving of a bit of breathing room? I’m basically just puzzling through it out as I type. Splashing around in the perpetually shifting waves of internal dialogue.

I want to jumpstart this kind of re-emergence into the world by considering on a practical level how I will approach this new beginning. I want it to feel as though we are stepping out of stale grayscale into potential and color, and I can manifest that every point on the path, even where I am following the simplest advice. Travel light. I can turn my attention to and place value in all of the minutia surrounding returning to campus safely. I can expand my joy, so that if the dreaded thing does happen, I have a wealth of positivity to draw from. In that sense, the superfluous can be grounding. It can cushion all of the extremely relevant concerns and risks in a patina of individually valued/weighted elements that expand this process into an exciting stage itself. It reminds me of who I am outside of this moment in global history.

So with fifteen days to go I am taking the ferry through the sun soaked morning, the subway over wrought iron bridges, my legs to my favorite bakery for a fresh oatmeal cranberry cookie. Things I once chose to do in solitude that I definitely took for granted I can appreciate again now that time is limited; the good things to come out of six months of Constant introspection, sifting through the grand and the granular. Another: daring myself to approach them differently. Travel light. My closet, typically a constant experiment, also feels stagnated by neglect in this time: I have fallen into a uniform dictated by speed. I hate uniforms with an anchor’s weight, so I’m taking the advice to “travel light” and turning it into a challenge. It’s a creative cryptex I’ve given myself: restrict my already limited options by making them more abstract at the expense of coherence and compatibility, and teleport them to the desert island that is rural Ohio. Quality over quantity, and not a pair of jeans in sight. Quality over quantity: that is my mentality to approaching this entire semester. If quarantine has meant shrewd diminution, I am going in the opposite direction: I will allow myself to be open to the experience, however soon it should end (touch red because I’m definitely jinxing it). I would remind others that that is something we can give ourselves: a place where we are maximizing the turning seasons, no matter how superfluous our place might seem.