Welcome | Bricks
Hi there. I'm Orphaeus. I've kicked around the idea of starting a blog for years, but for some reason, I'm actually doing it now. Let's see what happens.
Content warning: brief mention of self-harm, in the context of caring for others. (I promise they won't all be like this!)
At the university I graduated from, there is a tradition where the departing seniors get to place a brick in the walkway around the campus lakes. We had to pay for it, of course, but because it was funded by a deposit we had given the school when we entered as freshmen, many of us just said "why not?" and let it happen. We also didn't literally place it ourselves; I assume the groundskeepers were the ones to actually do it.
What made these bricks special was that we had the opportunity to customize the inscriptions on them. Some of the bricks I observed during my time there simply had the names and class years of those who added them, while others carried heartfelt messages of encouragement or advice for future students. Still others had clearly been seen as a chance to make someone laugh, or to comment wryly on the state of higher education in America (I have a picture of a brick that reads "Thanks for 5 stellar years, 40,000 debt, lastly a degree").
I studied music education, and since the performing arts building was right next to the lakes, I walked along the winding brick pathways often. At first, I just enjoyed noticing the bricks that happened to stand out to me, or searching for particularly interesting ones. As the semesters flew by, I eventually began to wonder what note I might add to the paths. I could never really come up with any pithy or humorous one-liners, and I wasn't sure what else would make for a worthy contribution to the tapestry that past students had woven together.
At the end of my sophomore year, my mental health began to crumble. It was dealt a shattering blow by the ending of my first serious, long-term romantic relationship, and over the next few months, the cracks in its architecture only widened and spread. I did not have the tools to cope with the damage, and it ultimately contributed to a fracturing of the foundations of every part of my life. To be honest, I suspect that those foundations had been shaky for some time, and that the breakup was merely a catalyst for a disaster that would have arrived sooner or later anyway.
Around that same time, I stumbled into a friendship with a student who was in the marching band with me, though she wasn't a music major. Let's call her Marie. Marie was a year ahead of me and we had known each other since my freshman year, but, for whatever reason, we hadn't really bonded outside of our interactions within our band group. I don't remember what happened that made us start to finally grow close. But over that summer, we slowly became friends and confidants. By the fall semester, we were regularly staying up late texting each other our hopes and fears, our triumphs and failures, and sharing the messy trials we faced each day. I would go visit her in the campus chapel, where she worked, and she would make sure to stop by the music building often, even when it wasn't marching band season anymore. I opened up about the pain, confusion, and hopelessness I had been wrestling with, and Marie trusted me with her own story of struggles with depression and other challenges. Together, we made our way through the gloom, helping each other find what light we could.
One night, well after both of us should have been asleep, Marie was alone in the chapel. I'm not sure if she called me or how I knew, but she needed me, so I went. She wasn't in the cramped office, or the grand sanctuary, but rather in the small silent prayer room that's tucked away in a corner of the building. It's a simple space, with just a few rows of chairs and a cross on the front wall, I think. But it has beautiful horizontal stained-glass windows along the walls, at the top by the ceiling. Marie sat below them in the front row of chairs.
When I got there, her eyes were wet. I don't remember what was wrong. It may have been a difficult time in her relationship with her boyfriend, or the stresses of classes, or, as is so often the case with depression, nothing in particular and yet also everything, all at once. We sat, sometimes speaking quietly and sometimes in silence, for a long time. She told me of the harm she had done to her body in the past, how it paradoxically seemed to ease the pain, and how the urges were still there, lingering in the back of her mind and the twitching of her fingers. I held her hands to discourage their nails from tearing the skin of her forearms.
After hours, we withdrew from the chapel, Marie to her apartment at the edge of campus and I to my residence hall down the road. Other late nights were spent together in the following months, sometimes her comforting me while I cried with my head in her lap, sometimes me just holding her while she silently waged an internal war against the shadows. Somewhere along the line, we adopted a sort of motto, borrowed from a charge given to her by a teacher she had in high school: "light up the darkness." Light was in short supply for both of us, but somehow we always found enough to shine for each other.
Eventually, inevitably, Marie graduated, and I was left behind. We kept in constant contact, of course, but it was still different coming back to campus in the fall without her. There was an emptiness where she ought to have been, a space only partly filled by new friends and relationships. Marie had left her mark, though, not just on me, but on the campus: as was tradition, she had placed a brick in the walk by the lakes. There it lay, its etched face reminding me of our promise to each other and to the world. "Light up the darkness."
When the time came for me to leave my own brick, I knew without question that I wanted to build on the foundation she had set. Back then, I was enthusiastically rushing headlong towards a career as a music teacher, and so I decided to renew our pact with a small addition. My brick reads "light up the darkness, sing into the silence."
Marie and I have gone our separate ways in life, and have fallen out of touch at times. She now works at the university we attended together, and I have alternated between teaching students and being one myself a few times. But we always come back to each other. I played piano at her wedding while I was in graduate school. She was there for me when my plan for my life started to fall apart. And our bricks remain in the walk by the lakes, a record in stone of our vow, one that will remain there, steadfast, long after we are both gone.
So that's what I'd like to do here, with my weird and precious time. To light up the darkness. To sing into the silence. Let's see what happens.