As I'm writing this, it's the morning after Senior Gala, and I am not pretty. I'm not fishing for compliments here - seasonal allergies have turned me into a slumping clump of hives and mucus. I've spent the better part of the past 24 hours with an icepack draped dramatically across my visage, emitting an asthmatic keening noise. On a related note, I'm also trying to make walking around campus with tissues jammed up my nostrils a Thing. Down, boys.
Unfortunately, I can assure you that I will look far worse on graduation day, which, scarily, is when you're reading this. With hours of pollenated pomp and circumstance to endure, my metamorphosis into a pufferfish is all but guaranteed. Somewhere in this throng of black robes, nostalgia, optimism and potential energy, I'm sitting swollen, sniffly and not-so-pretty.
Flanking me on either side, I expect, are my closest friends. These are the ones who have seen me at my head-in-the-toilet ugliest over these past four years and like me anyway. They are a beautiful bunch on normal days, and eerily so on momentous occasions like this one. There are photographs to be taken and memories to be made, after all, and you bet they've come prepared. Likely, they are reassuring me that I look great, even though I don't, and that you totally can't even tell I have allergies, even though you totally can, and that they would never put a photo online that I really hated, even though they have before. They are entirely full of it. I love them so much.
We've been doing the same scramble to get ready since we were jejune 18-year-old frat-goers: borrowed eyeliner, multiple outfit changes, hastily shaved legs, hair up or hair down? (I always vote up; they always vote down.) Giddily, frantically, we've pulled ourselves together, preening and applauding and asking for honest opinions that, more often than not, go ignored. It's not a process, but a ritual, and one that could only develop in the strange tumult of a freshman dorm. The soundtrack to our four years here is not - thank god - that horrible Asher Roth song, or that cheesy Green Day song, or any song, really. It's the whirring of blow dryers, the clacking of straightening irons and the hissing of dry shampoo.
I doubt that this morning's rush was much different from the others, but even screaming at your housemate through the bathroom door is significant when it's the last time you ever will. And even though it's silly to be conscious of the last time you apply eyeliner as a college student, and even sillier to admit in your college newspaper that such a thought crossed your mind, the mundane feels anything but mundane today.
There is no beauty secret or, at least, none that I know of, that can fix my face right now. I mean, I'm obviously going to do what I can with red lipstick and BB cream, but I doubt either of those will actually save me from looking like a wad of chewed bubblegum. And, anyway, I don't think the people who matter will remember me as the Graduation Gollum.
See, when I envision my friends next year, as we group-text about our increasingly divergent lives, I don't think I will picture them in their caps and gowns. More likely, I'll think of Yulia darting downstairs with two different earrings on, Arushi carefully drawing on eyeliner, Amanda tugging a straightener through her hair and Reb plodding around the house in a towel. After four years of getting ready together, we're finally ready. And even though this is not the face I wanted to present to the world on my last day as a Tufts student, it's the only face I've got, so I'll have to make do.
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Rebecca Santiago graduates today with a degree in English. She can be reached at rebecca.santiago@tufts.edu or on Twitter @rebsanti.
