April 11, 2024 | OPINION | By Zeke Lloyd
I despise black folding chairs. Unfortunately, this school uses, and reuses, the same stack of the wretched horrors for any and every event. I won’t miss them at all.
I’ve only ever felt one of two emotions while confined to one of those rigid, plastic-backed seats. Boredom is the most frequent by far — I can’t begin to count the hours I’ve spent listening to substanceless speeches and dull dramaturgies.
It turns out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uses the same brand of sitware (my neologism). I found out last year when I attended my sister’s graduation ceremony. Unsurprisingly, my seat produced the same familiar boredom. Who would have thought about such small manifestations of universal suffering?
Three hours into the event, they pronounced her name wrong. I blame the chairs.
Even worse than boredom is the other emotion I undergo in the chairs: anxious waiting. It comes in the moments before I speak to an audience. The instances are rare and the crowds are small, but on the few occasions I do talk in front of a group, I become wildly nervous.
Trails of sweat stand out in stark detail to the audience, shiny wet splotches on the hard black surface. Uncomfortable shifts, the product of a familiar and uncomfortable lump in my stomach, produce creaks and groans from the cheap, industrial support beneath me.
As I start to twist and turn, I stir up the last day’s meals as they threaten to reemerge unceremoniously. My heart races as my hands search hopelessly for an unassuming position in my lap while the reverberating beats are visible through the fabric of my shirt. I always go through the same sweaty, nauseating experience anytime I’m anxious. And those chairs always make it worse. At my sister’s graduation ceremony, I was grateful to have experienced only boredom and not anxiety.
A friendly stranger quickly dashed the feeling when he asked about my post-collegiate plans. It was a nightmare. I was a rising junior at the time, and I expected my mind to make its regular shift between its usual black folding chair dichotomy of bored to anxious.
But I didn’t get anxious. Instead, I felt my face grow red, my skin become hot and my eyes start to water. It was a new experience, and given that I was seated firmly in a folding chair, I was happy to find this third state of being not quite as mind-numbing or debilitating as boredom or anxiety –– I was sad.
I expect that was only a preview of the way I’ll feel after graduation. I’ll probably cry. Not right away. I don’t often cry in public.
But as I drive away from campus for the last time, I won’t be able to keep it together. I can picture it now. Cruising past an empty campus on a warm Colorado afternoon, I’ll watch sunlight fall aimlessly on abandoned grass. Reaching a hand out the window, I’ll feel dry heat trapped between black asphalt and a cloudless sky. A few tears will turn into a torrent. It won’t be long until I’m sobbing.
I always jump on a good opportunity to cry. A cathartic release, no matter how tragic the emotional root, is too psychologically insatiable to pass up. Driving away from four years of memories, I will certainly use that pathological momentum to catapult myself down memory lane. Tears act as strange, self-sustaining ammunition in that way. The more I cry, the more easily I recall emotions I thought I’d forgotten long ago.
On that lonely drive, all I’ll want to do is remember. I anticipate I’ll bawl uncontrollably for about five minutes or so — not because I’m happy to be leaving behind boredom and anxiety, but because I’m devastated to be leaving behind everything I’ve known. (Briefly, maybe, I’ll think of those black folding chairs and smile. Some things I’ll be happy to leave behind. They’ll be the exception.)
Then I’ll run out of tears. I’ll turn red eyes towards the open horizon. I’ll think of everyone else in their own cars. I won’t see them, I suppose because we’re all going different places. Maybe we’ll all be crying. And hopefully, we’ll each be looking towards our own open horizon.