August is wilting and a few golden leaves are preparing the season’s memorial. The terracotta clay plant pot my roommates and I have had for more than a year is caked with soil remnants but otherwise unweathered. From where I’m sitting in our tiny backyard, my half-eaten nectarine presents a hopefulness amidst such an end — yellow juice collects around the dish’s rim and a honey bee peruses the exposed parts. But the pit’s still red from its home inside the stone fruit, uncolored by an impending autumnal severity. I decide there’s something always steadfast within me, too, as my life oscillates between balmy and brisk.Â
In the spring, someone asked me of all the things I’d learned in college thus far, which has been the most important. I think I gave a half-serious, dismissive answer like “asset pricing models” — a leftover morsel of knowledge from the days of thinking I wanted to study economics. What I really wanted to say, I think, was how to exist in the world through wisdom imparted on me by the world. But that’s not a very digestible syllabus topic. From my place now beneath the late summer sun, I’m thinking about what I meant.Â
I met my childhood best friend when I was 7. Metaphors about tropical storms and green shoots were finally coming to an end that year. My family had just moved to Colorado from Michigan — I think my dad was nervous we’d all end up in a Ford factory — and she knocked on the door essentially demanding a camaraderie. She was persistent, decisive and fearless; I was reserved, contemplative and agreeable. We balanced each other out. I think we both carry a little of all of those things now.Â
It’s a serious thing to grow up with someone and still want them around, though with her, I wonder how you couldn’t. She taught me ballet steps (I never executed them successfully – I can’t touch my toes), the entirety of Selena Gomez’s early discography and how to care. Wherever she goes, she finds something bigger than herself to become a part of, and every time, she’s there wholly and authentically, fighting for a better world for everyone.Â
I also learn a lot from people I meet frequently and fleetingly. I’m particularly grateful to all the women older than me who have welcomed me into their lives compassionately and without judgment. Some of them have been classmates, some teachers and lots have been coworkers. I’ve sat across from them at desks or dinner tables or coffee counters and discovered the best places to buy heels, what to do when your dreams feel half-lived and kaleidoscopic and how to make friends with patience while you wait for a brood of ducklings to cross your street in the morning. I know how to appreciate prose that continuously returns to an image of a water strider, that preparedness is often an endless road and why grief, in all its forms, is love still alive and breathing. As we’ve eaten or drunk or walked, I’ve considered many of them embodiments of what I know now to be true confidence: showing up, bearing gratitude and internalizing a self image that’s unshakable because of its clarity and preciousness.Â
In turn, I’ve found that children can teach us important lessons we’ve abandoned since knowing the world primarily through vibrance and inquiry. I’m not around them often, but when I am, I’m stunned by their attentiveness to things I barely notice. Just in passing, I’ve learned that horses can sleep lying down, tree crowns never touch and some plants can “stress bloom” if they’re “worried they won’t survive.” In Spain last year, my friend had the youngest of a nomadic family say to her, “I’m from nowhere; I’m from everywhere.” They’re today’s greatest poets, in their actual writing and in their lyrical observations. What might crown shyness say about people? A lot, I think. We just have to listen.Â
I can see the sun skim the top of the Flatirons, retiring in oranges and pinks. Soon, the days of feeling awestruck when the redbuds bloom outside of Duane, steeping tea at the reservoir and cutting around the stadium at dusk while Christian Lee Hutson melodically recollects Dockweiler Beach will be reachable only through memory. I have four more months until I’m not a student anymore: an absence that hasn’t confronted me since I was 3 or 4, and I guess at the time, it wasn’t an absence. I was still a learner; though I didn’t know about risk registry, free indirect discourse or message testing, I could most definitely find the meaning in an intact planter pot or a scarlet pit. I think I still have a lot to learn.Â