A little away from most Swarthmore’s residential halls, tucked away in the corner next to The Lang Civic Center and across Singer, you’ll find Kyle House: a women’s dorm. Housing ten women in three rooms of doubles and three rooms of singles and a blue plaid lounge, laundry room, and open-wide white-walled kitchen downstairs — it is an encapsulation of what an ideal, sereneful dorm space looks like.
Placed there as a freshman, although a bit isolated from all the other freshmen, it has become one of my favorite and most formative spots on campus and a home I love dear. One of my favorite moments at Kyle is when it hits evening and the golden light of the sun streams in through the big, doll-house-like windows and beams across the wooden floor — just so perfectly, the timing right, that it squeezes a part of your chest. A bit off campus, it encapsulates peace as I often look out the windows, witnessing the sunset paint the sky with pink and purple brushstrokes.
However, Kyle is also beautiful during the early morning and late night hours. In the early mornings, when I am able to get my groggy self out of bed and wake up to watch the sky transform from pitch darkness to sunrise at 6 a.m., it is an invigorating awakening moment. Working on the homework I didn’t finish last night, there’s a peaceful quietness that only early mornings and late nights can create. A sort of stillness, as if the world watches as every word I type away echoes into the way the stone forms — dictating the way the flow of the Earth gravitates. Listening to the quietness of the world, it’s something precious that can only be cherished in the few minutes before the campus wakes up.
And late at night, as I rub my eyes, trying to stay awake to finish these last sentences for a paper due the next morning, there’s a similar sort of peacefulness contentedness. A sort of familiar silence as the rest of the world has retreated to their comforting bed and I, still awake, scribbling the words that will ordain what grade I will get on my paper. Rushingly editing, eraser marks scattered onto my desk, a bruised gray mark on the knuckle of my pinky — a craft in the making. Soft indie music plays and fairy lights twinkling around the window pane as I journal my thoughts, my reflections, my hopes for the future. Sometimes, I stay up a little too late, I think — I know. But something innate drives me to stay up and to explore life, experience firsts, and to achieve as much as I can with the little time I have on Earth. Realizations and reminders of how short of a time we have motivates me to say yes to everything and put more on my plate than I know I can take on — and sometimes I’m exhausted from this surge of hot passion to live. It’s even led to some negative health consequences and clearly, when I wake up and look at my tired, pale, dark eye bags, I can feel it most that it’s taken a toll on me. But I don’t know, I continue to even then pursue my dreams, to still stay up late trying to finish a presentation, to attend this event and perform at that event.
Through all this, when I’m listening to classical music and staring out the window, watching as the sunlight filters through the windows of Kyle, watching as the birds caw west, watching as I try to push myself toward a greater goal — in hopes of helping this horrid world— there’s something intrinsically evocative that clicks within me and transcends time: I realize that to be at this moment, present and content, there’s nothing to regret. For at this moment in time, here and now, I can see where I’m going, where we’re going, where the world’s headed and could be headed if it picks its head up and embodies the dreams and aspirations of the past and future — that this world could be for something greater — and then I know: somehow, we’ll live. We’ll live to tell the story that defined our generation: perhaps something hopeful, perhaps something worth living for.
