Envelopes

I recently applied to a college, and the whole process is a series of terrifying letters and anxious mailbox checking which due to a unique situation I may get the opportunity to repeat next year. I’ve spent the last two and a half months staring out windows and tapping my fingers, anxiously awaiting the decision of a single college as to my acceptance, like it’s some sort of privilege to get accepted to an exclusive institution which will cost me over $100,000 dollars and four years of my life so that I may gain a piece of paper and a pale semblance of a social life.

Part of this anxiety is driven by the process itself. The common application website is a menagerie of white on red, a similar contrast of that to blood on snow. And every process of the application seems designed so as to cause the maximum amount of anxiety. At one point, you are prompted to “waive your FERPA rights,” which is a series of words that sounds absolutely terrifying until you do some research into what this actually means. And the sheer bombardment of questions about me and my family meant I was reading tax forms and feeling like a real adult with real problems for the first time in my life.

The college I applied to specifically asked me to report my grades myself, using their additional questions in the common application website. This required me to go through my transcript and regret everything I had done over the past four years, and the unusual layout of my high school career meant that I constantly felt as if I were filling out the form wrong. I come across my C in AP Psychology and suddenly, I know that my chance for acceptance is slim, and why do I even bother, I should just lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling, and this is what my mother always warned me about this C will ruin my application, regardless that I got a 5 on the AP exam I’m a failure of a human being, so let’s just bury my face in a pillow and drink coffee and not sleep.

The act of writing the two essays was, in and of itself, not a difficult task. But the prompts I was presented with felt like insurmountable mountains of things, all dependent on having an interesting life with interesting people. One prompt option was just “describe your life,” and I looked out the window and considered just describing how exactly my house operated and how I knew it was raining because when rain fell it fell into our fireplace and made a peculiar noise which echoed throughout the entire house in such a way that sitting in my own bedroom I could tell that wet season was coming. Another prompt option asked me to “describe a problem,” and I considered describing how exactly through trial and error we determined why our dog smelled terrible all the time, and how we adjusted his diet so it was not so. (It was the gluten.) A third prompt option was “describe something interesting,” and I almost wrote about the nuance of fonts and the exact difficulty in creating something which scales infinitely, but ultimately I did not due to a combination of indecision and laziness.

And so the weeks passed and the first deadline I’d set for myself passed, and the true deadline loomed large but I procrastinated as hard as I could until finally it was the week before and I awkwardly banged out whatever I could and waited patiently for a teacher recommendation that never came.

The application required two teacher recommendations, and months beforehand I went to my Digital Media teacher. “Sure,” he said, “give me your letter and I’ll write a paragraph or two.” And I passed, since I didn’t plan on putting my academic integrity on the line for a recommendation. So I went to another teacher, and she said, “Of course,” and that afternoon I checked and she had completed her part, so one out of two down. I went to a teacher who I talked to often, and he said, “Yeah, sure,” and then months passed, and he didn’t turn it in, and I forgot about him until the weekend before the deadline came and I checked and it was still not done. And what happens next is a panic which shakes the ground and rattles the doors, a panic in which I shout profanities at nothing in particular and tears well in my eyes, a panic so bad my parents almost consider asking me what is wrong.

Monday comes and I am calm again, because Tuesday is the deadline so I’ll just have him submit it today and it will be fine. I walk to his door and he is not in class today, in his place the Jamaican substitute teacher that speaks slowly and whose mouth is wrinkled from smiling. “What is it,” he asks, in that peculiar way that only he can, and I consider hitting my head against the door frame hard enough that I might fall unconscious, and then maybe I’ll ask the EMT for a recommendation.

But instead I run to a history teacher and I asked her, with my hands grasped together in fear and prayer, for a recommendation that I could supply to this school so that the two essays I wrote had some meaning. And she accepted, but it wasn’t done by the end of the school day so I sprinted to her classroom catching her as she packed her items and together I walked her through the process of writing a recommendation for me, and it got done and I got home and collapsed on my bed and almost forgot to submit the application that night.

The only times I have genuinely prayed were at my grandmother’s funeral and right before I hit the submit button on the application, hoping that by the grace of god I had not fucked anything up majorly. And then it was gone, and there’s a measure of emptiness after that button press that hasn’t left since.

A few weeks later, the college sent me an envelope that was tall and thick. My mom saw the letter and broke into a small dance. “Open it,” she said, and her and my father sang a small song and stared at the letter as if it were the fulfillment of my hopes and dreams laid on a single sheet of paper. And I walked out slowly, heart beating rapidly, knowing that something was wrong because it was way too early but disregarding that small voice of reason in the back of my head. Inside the envelope was a single letter with an air of officialness so strong we all stood in reverence of the letter as I read it out loud.

“Dear Kyle,” I said, and my mom let out an excited giggle.

“Thanks for applying to the college of engineering…” A pause. I scanned the rest of the letter. The mood in the room had deflated.

“It’s a thank you letter for applying.” I announced this with the same tone I or another member of the family will eventually use to announce that the dog smells “that way” not because of his diet but because he has, in fact, expired. “And a magazine.”

The artificial thickness of the envelope had indeed been generated by a magazine published by the college, which I had been awarded as a prize for applying. My mother and father quickly realized the error they had made and apologized to me, but it was not their fault for expecting it to be more than it was. I went to my room and felt nothing but hope lost, for in that moment, holding the envelope, I’d felt more hopeful than any other time in recent memory.

Hopeful my future was bright. Hopeful that I’d get a degree from a top 20 out of state college. Hopeful that, instead of being obscured in a thick fog, my path had been laid out for me, a single, clear choice which I could take to whatever came next, not knowing what tomorrow was but knowing it was better than yesterday.

Waiting for the real decision from this college is an exercise in patience and anxiety. But, beyond all the surface level stress this has caused me, I still have that hope.

It’s just waiting for a thicker envelope.