An Open Letter to the Class of 2021
To The Class of 2021
I was born a loser. We all are.
The first thing I remember losing was a toy. A transformer, a plastic tank whose treads flipped out to become the legs and arms of a robot named Warpath. I remember running the tank up and down the legs of mannequins at JC Penny while my mother shopped for school clothes. When we moved on to Sears, I realized that I had left Warpath in a shoe display. We retraced my steps, searched the store, recruited sales associates. My robot had vanished.
Perhaps my biggest loss was a green hoodie. Young boys shed winter coats like reptile skins, but the hoodie had emotional value. The lining was somehow softer, the front pocket warmer. It smelled like fried dough, and when I pulled the hood over my head, I felt so relaxed I might as well have been asleep. I left it behind one Sunday at church. For the next three years, I rooted through the lost and found, hoping some anonymous benefactor would return my hoodie and help me feel safe again. I began to imagine a great bay where all the lost toys and clothes and coins would wash up, scattered in tide pools for people to wade in and recover.
I’ve lost keys, remotes, screw drivers, earbuds, gloves, umbrellas, and papers[1]. I buy zip drives in bulk; they’re practically designed to be lost. I’ve spent hours wandering side streets, garages, and parking lots, trying to remember where I parked, secretly terrified that I’d been towed or carjacked. I know exactly how to cancel debit cards or replace a driver’s license. I own no matching socks. I’ve lost many passwords, and just as many of the security clues (“First grade teacher’s name? Favorite movie in high school?”) required to retrieve them. Once, I lost my wedding ring at a bachelor party. “Your wife is not going to believe this,” my friend laughed. I shook my head. “Yes, she will.”
There are ways to recover that which we’ve lost — the Internet is great at tracking down old friends or song lyrics. I have a friend who tucks a GPS chip into his wallet, and as long as our phones[2] have battery power, we can make them call to us. Sometimes recovery requires a mnemonic device or sheer doggedness. At 24, I could recite all the romantic couplings of Beverly Hills 90210 by retracing the events of my sophomore year in high school. That sort of pop culture minutia seems interred under the sands of our memory’s abyssal plain, buried but not really gone. There’s some comfort that whatever fugue or anonymity may await me in old age, I’ll always know who lives in a pineapple under the sea or that Cheers[3] is the bar where everybody knows my name.
But there are some losses whose permanence rocks us. My father died suddenly three years ago; I was spared the pain of a slow decline for the mind that could remember the exact position of chess pieces in games he played decades earlier. I got to say goodbye. I thanked him for all he’d done for me. I promised to take care of Mom. I told him that I loved him. His eyes closed, his mouth opened. And then he was gone.
For months afterwards, I kept expecting him to show up. Maybe he would call me to give me car advice. Maybe Mom would send a picture of the two of them out to eat. I watched videos, afraid that his voice would fade, that somehow I’d forget the number of teeth in his smile or the glint of mischief in his eyes. But as his absence grew more pronounced, I realized that what I was missing most was his perspective, his unique outlook on life borne of his adventures, victories, and losses. My father peered into my own life and gave it meaning and context. Without him, I have less depth and understanding. A gem that loses its facets is just a rock.
I’ve spent the past year and a half thinking about such loss as we watched calendar pages flip by without dances, concerts, football games, or pep assemblies. There are desks in my classroom in which nobody sits. There are students whose voices I’ve never heard, whose faces are just black squares on a screen. So many relationships that never sparked, memories that never strung. The loss is so painful and so profound that language fails us — we literally don’t have a word for a school year that never happened. Some psychologists use the German noun Sehnsucht to describe a despair or longing for a better life than what we lived. The Portuguese word saudade sometimes evokes homesickness for a place you’ve never been. But neither of those terms quite match the feeling of the final days of senior year where we feel more nostalgic for what never happened than for what finally did.
That’s loss, the likes of which few ever experience. And yet, what this year has really done is underline in red ink the universality of losing. We all lose chargers, earrings, best friends, and parents. When it happens to us, it feels like a frustrating inconvenience, a temporary disruption, when really all of life is loss. We’ll lose everything in the end.
But we also find things. And the discovery — or rediscovery — gives shape to the best parts of our lives. There are few feelings that can match hearing a new song that electrifies our nervous system. We can’t wait to talk about a restaurant we try for the first time or a show that popped up in our Netflix queue. You try Topgolf and find out you have a natural swing. You start a new job and learn how to make the perfect sandwich. You go to work one day and meet the love of your life. These things happen all the time.
That is, of course, part of why the next six months of your life are going to be so thrilling. Because you’re going to find a lot. New friends, teachers, places to eat, laugh, read, fall in love. You’ll buy a fresh hoodie and slide your hands in that front pocket. It will feel like coming home.
But there is still time for discovery here. You have classmates you haven’t met. You have relationships you can still recover, with the same feeling of relief that accompanies a document you thought you deleted. It’s very likely that next Friday you’ll be sitting at graduation next to a stranger. Talk to her. See what’s there. “Why would I invest myself in someone who I’m just going to lose in a couple of months?” you’ll ask. So true.
But you never, ever really know what you might find.
All Good Things,
Mike Rossi
[1] Though I’ve lost individual student assignments, I’ve never lost a class set of essays. Once, my wife called to tell me that our dryer had caught fire, and I was briefly elated because I’d left a stack of AP3 essays on it. When I came home, however, the essays were merely singed, and I still had to grade them.
[2] In 2016, Americans spent more than $30 billion on lost phones. I blame Pokémon Go.
[3] Cheers, a popular sitcom that ran from 1982 to 1993 features an unforgettable ear-worm of a theme song. All 275 episodes are available on Netflix, and it is highly bingeable.
