A College Senior Spills Her Milk

by Kaleigh O’Connor

My 90-year-old aunt and I chuckled over the phone today about how it’s useless to cry over spilled milk. I think I have never fully understood the overly-quoted maxim. Right now, it feels like Dorothy pinching my chin and reminding me to not moon over a mess that can’t be undone. She virtually comforts me from 6 minutes down the road in Newton, where she lives in a nursing home, a forbidden land to the threats of public health and viral infection.

21 years old, detained in my parents’ living room in the middle of silent suburbia, exiled from my school, my friends, my independent life, it truly felt like tiptoeing around a sticky hardwood flooded with curdled 2%.

I laughed with Dorothy because I have felt foolish letting my tears spill over a fate as frivolous as school being cancelled. I think back to all the nights of putting spoons under my pillow and wearing my pajamas inside out and praying for that very fate. And now here I am, muffling my weeping in my childhood bed.

My parents shouldn’t have to hear my self-pity. The other night, I felt ashamed to admit to myself that I had not cried this often since the death of my cousin almost 3 years ago. I wallowed in my own melodrama. 

Leafing through my desk drawers to fill the hours of nothingness, I came across the same cousin’s funeral prayer card. A part of us went with you, the day God called you home, written on the back in italic ink. I thought about my unshakable melancholy as I came to terms with my new reality. I thought about how a large part of grief involves mourning that piece of ourselves that we surrender with the loss of a relationship. A part of us went with you. Sometimes it is sudden, uncalled for, and just like that, a chunk of our being goes missing. We are left with feelings of shock, confusion, an indescribable emptiness lodged behind the sternum. If you’ve ever experienced the infamous “grief comes in waves,” you know these very feelings.

I bop my head to “Banana Pancakes” and think about my friend Jack on the swim team and remember him swinging me around the dance floor of Town Tavern two Wednesdays ago. I wonder if I’ll see him at all in my near future and suddenly my skin chills with that nerve-pinching emptiness.

I do not mean to liken my sudden suspension from bar crawls and lawn Frisbee to the tragic loss of a loved one. It is certainly not the same degree of grief. But I am slowly realizing that for us college seniors facing an involuntary, premature graduation, we have not just lost our school ceremonies, but we have lost a part of ourselves. The student. The athlete. The artist. The curious girl that wanted to know everyone’s story, but never fully took the chance. She is gone and replaced by a gloomy potato lazed on her parents’ couch reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She fills the hours of nothingness with her spilled milk. 

The relationship with school that we have known and loved has been ripped away. And in turn, we lament the parts of ourselves displaced along with it. It is unsettling to take classes at my mother’s kitchen counter. It is daunting to acknowledge an uncertain future of seeing our friends, our classmates, our 4-year version of home. But I find solace acknowledging that the spilled milk itself is not senseless to cry over. It’s sticky and ugly and I think I’ll just cry about it if I want to. Yes, the deed cannot be undone. But my broken parts will be taking their time to mop up this mess. 

Goodbye college, my best self will always be with you.