In a few short days, I will be leaving the city that made me who I am today. When I think about the amount of growth that I’ve seen in myself, it’s truly a wonder I had any substance at all upon my arrival. My happiness then was derived from fresh eyes unadulterated by the perversions, suffering, and realness of the world. My happiness today is a fountain flowing from the hope of a tomorrow that will be just as great — if not happier than the day before. From my first encounter with Berkeley, I knew that this was a magical place, grounds of the intellects and formative perspectives of the colossals and those whose ideas were only just burgeoning buds like my own. All together, students and community were colliding like thousands and thousands of molecules. And what beauty did result in the better of the two sides of the bay.
It was years ago that I found myself wandering around, a stranger, a passerby under the turquoise spirals of Sather Gate. The rain fell that day, soaking us through. Between droplets, trinkling tinkling melodies played out as dancers gracefully moved across the rosy, red bricks, slick from the rains. In that moment, I had fallen in love unknowingly. Somewhere in me, I knew that I would be back to this place.
Five years have past since that day. Five years elapsed. Each of those years, those 365-days were filled with a spirit that awoke the force that I am today. Berkeley made me strong — in ideas, opinions, feelings, passions, and understandings. The books I read and the people I met colored both my cheeks and ideas as I found my own voice and opinions. The books I can keep, and most I have. They are safely packed away, stripped from their white shelves in my apartment. The people I have met are those that I leave behind, or have already made their own departures,and whom I shall miss immensely. It is by their hands that I took shape.
I am a hunk of clay slapped together, pushed, folded, molded by those whom I meet. In this way, I have learned others’ perspectives and let them inform my own, been shown worlds I had never before seen. Some challenged my beliefs, others found congruence. All of them, even those that caused pain, were at first welcomed and now a part of me.
This is my thank you to you. You who have been a part of my journey through the past years. Whether it was sharing a peanut butter and honey sandwich on your homemade bread, 2-hour phone calls, bumping into each other on Bart, befriending each other at a coffee shop, studying together, hardly studying at all, learning from each other, sideways smiles, airport hugs, pitchers of margaritas, late night tacos, taking trains together in North-Western Italy, dancing by the ocean, making bucket lists only to lose them later, jumping into the Mediterranean sea, exchanging stories, showing each other the progression of our lives through notebooks, solving crossword puzzles, drinking insane amounts of coffee, sucking at chess, riding around on vespas, painting, sending DM messages and tagging one another in the strange-wonderful-and-cool of Instagram, reading love poems and writing them, feeling absolutely free atop the Campanile, dancing the nights away under the stars at Sproul Plaza, driving around in cars singing SORRY, coffee shop musings to escape the 9-to-5, dancing on tables-hair on end forming halos around our heads, midnight campus walks, singing and dancing to songs of the heart, eating, sitting on rooftops overlooking the bay as the sunset, making our way to Grizzly Peak, design sessions at work, spontaneous trips out of the country, deserts before dinner, this is for you and the memories that I hold in the bottomless bucket of my heart. My mom once told me that the heart can only love more and more. Love is exponential, not a zero-sum game. I know that my love has only known expansion and it is baffling how much so. I remember once feeling my heart swell up so in acknowledging how I felt for those around me, the life I was consumed by.
It’s both with tremendous excitement and lucid bewilderment that I take this breath and let it go. It hurts to think that I will wake up in a room that is not my own, not familiar, no memories to paint the wall; where I cannot hope to see you hanging around Strada, text you to meet up along Telegraph, or hang upon the chance that we might cross paths on the street. These feelings are repelled, drowned out, masked by the euphony created by even uttering the name, Chicago. Somehow I have made the word abstract. Maybe by repetition. Maybe by such intense fixation upon the place. Made more real as the days pull me closer and closer to boarding the plane.
My body can’t wait to be on the move again. My mind can’t wait to be challenged and learning again.
Bye, bye Berkeley. It is you who I have fallen in love with. But like all things in life, nothing is always. Temporality reigns supreme and thus we dance on towards the sun.
Gabriella Gini 