How Firm Thy Friendship
As my friends and I rushed the field on Saturday night after our one point win over Penn State, I was overwhelmed with inexplicable emotion. It felt electric, maybe. I feel that way while I’m at concerts too, but this was a little different. It was similar to our win last year over Michigan, when we also rushed the field. During the regular season, rarely do I stay the whole game (sorry, dad). But I’m glad I did for this one. I got several texts from family and friends saying, “Can’t imagine the energy there!” as they watched on their TVs.
While contemplating this unexplainable feeling yesterday, I remembered a speech I read over the summer that coined a phrase to describe my exact emotions. In 2012, Yale student Marina Keegan wrote a graduation essay titled The Opposite of Loneliness. Sadly, she died in a car accident five days after graduation. That essay went viral, however, and her parents published a book with the same title–a collection of all her essays and short stories, with The Opposite of Loneliness as its introduction.
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness,” Keegan writes, “but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life…it’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”
When the Shoe was shaking on Saturday night from the jumping and the screaming and the hugging and the crying, I felt the opposite of loneliness. But that post-win moment is only a culmination of what I’ve been mulling over for the last several months at Ohio State.
This post is premature, I know, because I’m going to want to say the exact same thing after my final game in the Shoe senior year or in the spring of 2019 when we’re all crying that it’s over. But at this moment, more than halfway done, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on how fast it’s all going and how it scares me to lose this “elusive, indefinable” opposite of loneliness.
I’m also trying to not take for granted the opportunity to always learn. How easy it is. I hope I’ll continue my ambition for lifelong learning after college, but I’m afraid other obligations could get in the way. I laugh awkwardly when my friends complain about school, how they hate their classes, how they can’t wait to get a real job. I could stay here forever, I think. Not at all because college is supposedly the “best years of your life” or because of the partying or the sports. But because of the constant incentive to learn, all while being here together.
Of course, I won’t stay here forever. Even if I become a professor some day, I’ll get out into the real world for a while beforehand. Although “the best years of our lives are not behind us,” Keegan claims, “they’re part of us…the notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical…we can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
Though not something Keegan mentioned in her speech, I feel the opposite of loneliness through social media, as well. I’ll read satirical tweets about the new campus clock tower, watch the campus Snapchat story about major events like the passing of Afroduck, or constantly see photos and stories from my friends all across the country, engulfed in their own opposite of loneliness bubbles, too — they all seem to be connected somehow, like these hundreds of people are with me, always.
So as I was up in the stands on Saturday, then rushing onto the field, I couldn’t help but feel happily overwhelmed by the sense of security from our web of interconnectedness. Today I’ll walk across the Oval, along with thousands of other students, listening to the bells of Orton Hall, and feel content that if I set aside the small, irrelevant regrets, there isn’t much I would change about my life right now, and there isn’t much I’d give up to not experience the opposite of loneliness. What a wonderful, indescribable feeling that is.
