No forewarning could have prepared me for the moment I heard the news that the last term of my Choate career would occur only remotely. As it happened, I was shopping at Target in Miami when the fateful Outlook notification popped up on my screen. An intense vertigo overwhelmed me on the spot, literally forcing me onto the floor. I sat cross-legged in the aisle where I had been searching for linguini for that night’s dinner, trying to steady myself with deep breaths. It’s hard to describe the emptiness I felt as the scale of what I had just lost began to hit me. Just like that, senior spring — and my time in Wallingford — was over.
The next few days, memories flooded my mind in a jumbled sequence, a movie I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to watch. Orchestra rehearsals in Colony Hall; coffee while lounging on the orange couches in Lanphy; warm spring sunlight flooding through the PMAC balcony’s large, dreamy skylights. I pictured the suit and tie I would have worn for Last Hurrah, pictured the cross-country course on Sunday mornings, pictured going to New Haven with my friends. It scared me how quickly all of it had vanished.
It felt as though I had lost a loved one. And in a way, that’s what it was, right? We seniors lost all the time we thought we would be spending together — all the moments and interactions we would have had with friends and teachers. We were prematurely cut off from the sources of meaning and fulfillment in our lives, and we were denied the ability to form memories we felt entitled to.
Not long after the day I heard the news, I boarded a series of flights back to Hong Kong, where I’ve spent the spring term. I’ve been trying to keep up a semblance of normalcy while I’m back here: swimming at the beach, meeting up with old friends (while following all social-distancing guidelines, of course), and spending time with family. A lot of Netflix and SNL binging and even more reading. Everything has been one large effort to bury the thought of my losses deep in the back of my mind. I just want to forget it all happened. Because, if I embark on that unending cycle of thought about everything I would have had in my senior spring, everything from loneliness to anger to emptiness will begin to wash over me again.
The School’s efforts to create some vaguely normal experience — Zoom classes, video messages, packages bearing alumni vests — are nice, and I am very appreciative of the School’s many efforts to simulate a typical spring term online. But — by no one’s fault — remote engagement with one another hardly makes up for the real thing. More often than I care to admit, I selfishly wonder: Why did it have to be my year and my friends that had to lose it all? What were the odds?
I want to recognize here that, of course, my situation is not the worst, by far. People around the world have lost much more than time at school. I feel extremely lucky that my family, friends, and I are healthy; that we have a roof over our heads; and that we get to spend this period of isolation together. These are privileges that many don’t have.
I merely want to express here, in my final words for the newspaper I’ve worked on for two years, that I — along with the rest of Choate’s Class of 2020, as well as all the other classes of 2020 across the globe — am hurting. By sheer misfortune, we were forced away from our homes and friends without any closure, and, unlike our younger peers, it is not a matter of when we’ll see each other again, but if we’ll ever see each other again. Who can really say where we seniors will be months from now?
For now, and though this is in no way how I would have ever imagined I’d be doing it, let me say: Goodbye, Choate Rosemary Hall, and thank you for everything.
