This article originally appeared on Medium.com on May 22, 2020. I’ve since graduated and started this blog for these reasons.

I’m graduating college on Sunday. I’m graduating and I think I will do it while I’m still curled in bed, wishing I brought my switch with me to my mom’s house, a lukewarm bottle of champagne at my feet, half paying attention until they start reading out the ‘L’ names. You know as well as I do… graduations are boring. But it’s the kind of pomp and circumstance that I imagine is a wonderful mental momento. You think back on graduation and you see the tassles and tears and sweat brewing under the (polyester?) gown — and you know you get to close the chapter

Of course, the world is decidedly not on fire. Not literally, at least. The past few months have made most of us indescribably thankful for our health and security. We owe essential workers, who have always been essential, everything. We owe black and brown and underprivileged people, who are fighting against stacked odds, everything. What I am saying is the list of things I have to be grateful for have grown every day of this pandemic. Being a slighted graduate with a chip on her shoulder… well, pass me my tiny violin.

All that and still, I want my months back. I want to sweat under polyester on May 24th. To have those last days etched into my memory, so I can go back and feel the grooves. Pandemic has shown me how neat I like my endings. Milestone’s marked clearly for my convenience. After quarantine began, school was bleeding into work into home into unironically using zoom socially. Nothing felt distinct. No section of my life happening apart from another because it was all there laid out for me to see. All of my identities expanding and collapsing within the four walls of my Brooklyn apartment. Maybe you feel this way too.

I don’t want to romanticize this time. For some, these long months have been about survival. Trying to get the lungs to open enough to take a breath. Grieving a loved one who had to die alone, whose body you won’t see again. I’m an anxious- 2020-liberal arts- almost graduate. I feel lucky to have the room to try to make meaning of this time. Making meaning is my particular method of survival, anyway. And for me, the world feels on fire, burning through the very structures I thought were permanent. I won’t delve too deep into my own metaphor. Everyone who needs one should make their own if it’s to be of any use.

I’m graduating on Sunday with every version of myself and nowhere to go. I’m sad and I’m also grateful for how this time has made me reimagine what comprises an audience. I am my own witness, alongside my sisters and parents and the gross couch who has held me since I was pre-teen. These are strange times. Stranger yet that I think I’m getting worse at imagining what a “good ending” to the past four years would look like. I’m not sure I mind. The world’s on fire, anyway.