Sunday, June 15, 2025, in Hanover is the first hot day I can remember in months, the air sticking between my lacy white Free People undergarments. My feet hurt from my sparkly high heels. My eyes are puffy and exhausted from a lack of sleep. I shuffle into the library and pick up my Dartmouth diploma, say “Hi” and “Bye” and “See you never” to the kid I made out with in a frat basement my freshman fall, give a half hug to red-headed Charlie. Thousands of people are milling around on the Green. Picture, picture, another picture—I’m ready to kill the moms who keep arranging us and rearranging us, capturing our feigned smiles. I hold my cobra-headed secret society cane over my head one more time and then … I can’t be here.
“Wanna swim?” Kalyn asks. She’s my friend whose dad almost married my mom, the closest thing I have to a blood-related sister. I nod. It’s exactly what I need.
“Watch my shoes,” I say to my mother. She is wearing a paisley-pattern blue dress, and she’s beautiful. People have been telling me I look like her all weekend. If only.
I link one arm with Kalyn and the other with Emma, our half-bleached-blonde friend. I am much taller than them and our strides are uneven. We run across the Green past Sandra Oh, our Commencement speaker, past the hoard of graduates who are just like us: terrified. My feet strike against the familiar pavement and crunch the occasional pebble. Come on, come on, come on. I am 18 again, 19 again, 21 and with a boy who says thank you every time I tell him I love him.
“My mom said I don’t have time to dip because I have brunch with my grandparents, but you know what? Fuck it. It’s my brunch,” Emma says. I laugh.
We run past 8 School, the house I always wanted to live in, where bands would play shows and I would watch the 6-foot-8-inch boy with the long, red hair who screamed into oblivion on his bass. We pass 5 Maple, the house I lived in for a year, the house I grew up in with Kira and Zanna and Catie. I wanted so badly to be there forever. We go past the familiar wandering lady with silver hair muttering to herself. I’ll never see her again.
We pass Nathan’s Garden, built to honor the 11-year-old boy who will always be 11. I broke up with my boyfriend twice in that garden. I told my mother I loved her in that garden. I once kissed a girl on dew-wet grass in that garden.
We wiggle our bodies through construction, past the man in the yellow hard hat who asks me how the temperature is in that water every day. We enter the gate to Mink Brook as we’ve done so many times before, down the haphazard wooden stairs, my feet raw against the pine needles, my body aching. We reach the river and peel off our stained white dresses.
“I think I’m going to be late,” Emma says.
“That’s okay. Worse things happen to better people every day,” I say. “Except for today. This is the worst thing, and we are the best people.”
Kalyn sobs. Then she and Emma jump off the mud-encrusted bank and I follow. We wade into the now warm Connecticut River where Mink Brook ends. I want to sleep and I want to stay awake here forever. We are naked and there is a man watching us in the pontoon boat across the river and there is a family canoeing and we don’t care. We wade until the water reaches our hips. Tears engrave our bodies.
“OK, I’m going to baptize myself now,” Kalyn says. Arms outstretched, she falls backward into the water. Emma and I follow suit.
We emerge sobbing.
“I’ll never live in a place with this much water again,” I say. Emma nods. Kalyn holds her breasts and keels over.
“I’ll never have fun again,” she says. “I didn’t have fun before Dartmouth.” We all nod. We all agree. This is the place where we learned how to have fun. How could we ever recreate it? I remember what Kalyn told me yesterday, that my dad said she’d forever be chasing this feeling. I wonder if he meant it.
Emma says she has to go and leaves. Kalyn and I take a little more time but not much. I want my body to melt into this New Hampshire air.
Two clumsy bulldogs come running down the steps, their paws muddy. One is younger and loose skinned and the other is aging, like we are. The younger one steps all over Kalyn’s dress, playing with the denim she strung through it to make it fit her body. He takes her white laced shoe in his puppy teeth. She laughs in a high-pitched way that’s imprinted in my brain.
I remember what I heard at the funeral service we attended two weeks ago, when a girl gave a eulogy for her best friend and said that nothing they could ever do together would be lame or weird as long as they liked it.
The keepers of the bulldogs follow, and I am still in my skin-toned slip and clipping Emma’s bra to my small chest. Kalyn is slipping her dress back over her head.
“Hi,” the woman says. “Sorry about them.”
Kalyn shakes her head. “No, don’t worry.”
I smile. The woman grimaces. She has round, blue eyes and threads Kalyn’s shoes through her dog’s teeth, freeing them at last. “What’s with the canes?”
She’s looking at our staffs leaning against the mud bank—one with the Osiris head, one with the cobra, both symbolizing the spaces we inhabited during our last two years at Dartmouth.
“They’re for secret societies,” Kalyn says.
“I’m in Cobra, she’s in Osiris,” I say. I want to tell her about the times I spent in the red-walled room, singing with my sisters, “This is so long and not farewell.”
“Oh, I see. Did you graduate today?” the woman asks. Her bespectacled husband stands a few feet behind her. He readjusts his hat.
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, congratulations!” she exclaims.
“I don’t know why everyone keeps saying that,” Kalyn says, pointing at her and sobbing. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m taking this out on you.”
“Trust me, it’s wonderful you feel this way,” the woman responds. She’s beautiful, wrinkles around her eyes displaying a lifetime in the sun. “You will keep coming back here.”
I want to believe her. I want to believe I’ll keep coming back to this water to keep baptizing myself. Yesterday, I came here with my father, an ’86. He told me it was the best part of his day. Kalyn is kneeling on the ground, her face in the shoe-thieving puppy’s skin. “They’re therapy dogs,” the woman says. “We’re training him.”
“I worked in alumni relations for 25 years,” the man finally says. “You have something special.”
The woman continues. “We live on Sargent Street in the big house with the two bulldogs outside. We call it the bulldog house. We have an Airbnb in the back of the house that alums stay in every time there is a reunion or a Homecoming.”
I know that house because it’s on the street with the colorful houses—blue, yellow, pink—the street I walk down when I want to imagine all the possible iterations of my life.
“That’s wonderful,” Kalyn replies.
“You two are welcome to stay there anytime. And if there isn’t room in the Airbnb, just stay in our daughter’s empty room.” The woman says this earnestly, like she really means it.
“Thank you.” I mean it, too. I realize I don’t even know her name.
Kalyn and I are clothed now. We walk back up the hill. We pass the construction work and Sargent Street. We walk to our no-longer home on 17 South Park Street, where we’ve lived for the past year and where students will continue to live for many more years.
We part ways, exchange “love you.” Waiting for us is the world.
Ulla-Britt Libre works as a news reporter for The Sheet in California’s Eastern Sierra. A version of this essay originally appeared on her Substack.
