I’m all about puppies during finals because I never feel like less of human than when I have written the phrase “sociopolitical framework” and wondered whether what I meant was actually “geopolitical,” when I am running around like a lunatic memorizing things I am about to forget because this school wants me to know them for a split second, because there is something wrong with a program of study that tells me both to follow my heart and find my passions and fulfill my STN all while writing a thesis and I mean this not as an exact criticism of Princeton but a criticism inexactly, with no malice, if possible, though certainly some disillusionment and disappointment, not minimally in myself; the reasons I chose to come here are now as foreign to me as my high school desire to not spend Friday nights watching television. I do not not like it here: I have learned most of all how little I mean and how big the world is and why it is important to be able to remember why I care what it is that propels me along even so. It used to be being the smartest and the best but I got as close as I could, considering, and now even that is coming to an end and I have no jobs and no ideas for a job and a thousand cover letter documents saved in my computer and a Google Chrome folder full of job openings because everything sounds great and nothing sounds right. My mind collapses in on itself like a tent in the wind when I start to think about it, think “where,” look up all the conscionable jobs in various metropolises and they all sound fine and they all sound good and then I think “okay not ‘where,’ ‘what,’” and then I realize I have no idea “what,” so I think “why,” and then I realize I do know “what,” all I have ever known is “what” and I can do it anywhere and then I am at “where” again, and though there are many many places when they are all in a folder on my computer screen it seems that there is actually no “where,” that there is actually only this strange blankness before me both literally and metaphorically and when I watch a video of a Bichon Frise puppy so white and so fluffy I am not even sure it has bones and actual tears come to my eyes and my stale desiccated heart pumps once more because I remember that the one thing I can do as a real human, where or what or why I am, is feel something calve off the glacier-heart in my chest and show the shock of color underneath. That my heart opens to let some people in and makes others stay out like some kind of vicious carnivorous flower. There are various lovable things around me, the boy in my eating club who eats alone and laughs quietly at the jokes of those around him and who I always want to talk to but won’t because as a senior I can barely maintain the friendships I have that have managed to last even this long, and the seven-yearold girl who lived in my driveway this summer in an RV with her mother wouldn’t say “please” because it’s a begging word who wrote me a letter a month ago I thought about Instagramming but have not yet thought about responding to, and what a waste it feels to me to be filling and filling a word document with totally dead words about a real religion I don’t believe in just so I can graduate, a class I am taking because I have to, which has none of the fervor or the faith only the legal codes and the degrees of separation from God’s word, but it is God’s word I thought I wanted to do all this for, so the puppies shiver and shake with love and gladness to be home and be loved and really we all know that is all there is and how all I really want these days is to move my body through its life with that much glee, to hurl it at its future as eagerly as the small thing does its owner, coming home to claim it again, and again.

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