monotony
C,
One of the pieces we had to read for my French class was a short piece on the rolling walkway inside the Montparnasse metro station. The author was writing in the 1980’s, and he describes masses of people riding the long walkway, passing each other, looking absently straight ahead. There’s a term to describe this life: metro-boulot-dodo — a never-ending rhythm of metro, work, sleep, repeat.
Many of my days feels this way. When I’m motivated, I wake up early enough to exercise in my apartment’s gym, sweating it out alongside various other men and women who I rarely make eye contact with. I’ll shower, make breakfast, get dressed, and leave my apartment by 8:30am, or at least try to.
The rest of my day stretches from 9–6 in the offices and corridors of Capitol Hill. Sometimes I don’t even know what the weather is like outside. Around 1pm, I’m always surprised at how slow time passes. Yet at the end of the day, I’m again surprised at how much time has slipped away from me, how another day has passed with little fanfare and little to show for the hours. When I arrive home, the sun is usually setting. I’ll make dinner. Sometimes, I’ll run and read the news. Then the clock resets and I’m on repeat.
You know me — I’d like my days to be a jam-packed, exciting, sometimes stressful, highly productive movie playing on fast forward. I want to be on the move, exploring! And productive doesn’t mean I have to be working — it just means I have to be doing something meaningful. I’m okay with soaking away hours in rest and relaxation in a good conversation with close friends. The 9–6 workday feels like it is directly sucking the energy and joy of living away from me.
No wonder people say that college is the best time of your life. I’ve gotten so used to living with a group of people, the constant flow of friends in and out of my common room, knocking on my door. I’m craving the luxury of going to my suitemates’ performances, my best friend’s concerts, the spontaneity of being able to pick a library to study in. Every day is filled with new ideas, interesting discussion, the possibility of a 4am conversation or baking cookies at midnight, the ability to find laughter in the buttery (a cheap café open late in the basement of our residential colleges) or knock on a friend’s door just by traipsing down the stairs. Dinner is always a meal you can share with someone else.
I miss that so much. I’m so worried about only having three years left of this bubble, this basket of plenty, this golden glow. I’m so scared of life after graduation, even though that seems far away.
I can’t imagine living years like I’ve been living this past month — in a too-constant rhythm where the most exciting part of my week is probably grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. It’s not like I haven’t been doing exciting things over the weekend — I’ve gone on midnight monument tours and traveled to different cities and my best friends have come to visit me and bake blueberry muffins and watch movies. But Monday through Friday feels like it’s disappeared into a black hole, where I mostly miss people and the ability to laugh at them instead of the pixels on my phone screen.
If anything, this summer has heightened the pressure on me to find something rewarding. Something that will fill my cravings for an exciting and unpredictable life, a path post-college that satisfies my hunger for adventure and variety. Something meaningful to fill the inevitable void when I’ll have to move away from the family I’ve found on campus.
Already, a month of monotony has felt soul-sucking. I want to live life in technicolor, doing something challenging and exciting, surrounded by the people that I love, the friends that I’d do anything for.
I pray that in three years, I’ll have figured out how.
Love,
L

