a strange, beautiful, improbable thing
Sitting in the darkânot dramatically, just circumstantially. The sun slipped away while I was indie web surfing, and now the room is shadowed, music pulsing quietly from my smart speakers like some tame, digital familiar. I could speak againâto summon lightâbut it feels... unnecessary. The mood is good. Not brooding. The dark just is. An ambient artifact instead of an omen.
- Whistling In the Dark, They Might Be Giants
There's only one thing that I know how to do wellÂ
And I've often been told that you only can doÂ
What you know how to do wellÂ
And that's be you, be what you're like, be like yourselfÂ
And so I'm having a wonderful timeÂ
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
An Unarrival
In 2000, I arrived at Beloit College for my first year of university, dragging behind me the spectral residue of high schoolâa place that had wrung me out, especially the penultimate year, which still echoes like a cold wind rattling unseen windows. That year was a psychological nadir, darker than even my most overloaded, overstretched semesters to come.
But Iâm not here to exhume those particular corpses tonight. The twin junior yearsâboth literal and metaphoricalâare curios in the museum of memory. Iâll let them rest under glass, undisturbed for now.
What mattered then was this: Beloit was just far enough away from home that it gave me space. Space to breathe. To drift untethered for the first time. There was a softness in the separation, a dimensional veil that let me slip free from the skin I wore in high schoolâa skin tight with anxiety and sharp-edged self-loathing - as un-shattered in ways I could not have in the same wastes I pupated in....
I didnât know how to talk to people. So I didnât. I poured whatever identity I had into aesthetic rituals: the decor of my dormâtwinkling blue and green lights like a strange starfieldâand the controlled volume of Rammstein bleeding through the walls, a sonic signal: I am here, but not for you. Not yet.
To speak would have meant exposure. Vulnerability. An unacceptable risk.
Undemanding Unexplaining
But the thingâthe strange, beautiful, improbable thingâwas this: the people at Beloit didnât demand explanation. They were curious. Deeply, weirdly, wonderfully curious. They poked at the façade gently, like tapping on the glass of a dark terrarium. They didnât flinch at what looked back. Somehow, they sensed what even I couldnât articulate: that inside the armor was just a scared, unfinished creature trying to survive its own mind.
And they didnât run. They just... hung out.
They existed in the liminal spaces with me, sat in the soft dark, unafraid. Not expecting, not fixingâjust being. And in that shared twilight, I found room to become.
An Unfear
I had always feared the darkânot for what it concealed, but for the version of me it revealed. The one slumped in the corner, waiting to carry my exhausted shell back to bed. At Beloit, people gave me the space to meet that shadow. To befriend it. To become someone who could carry themselves.
I never really thanked them.
Soâthank you, Beloiters.
It only took twenty years, but you deserve that gratitude whispered out loud.
Even if the lights are still off.