This is for all who went to RISD Precollege 08 and had a blast. Some of you might even see yourself in this. This is both personal and universal. So read it, feel it and believe it.
THE SMELL OF MOANING MEMORY
August 9th, 2008 © Jess X Chen / Flappability 08
(RISD SUMMER TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT)
Summer was you, alive, independent, exhausted and soaring, with the thick muddy sweet of freedom gushing through your veins.
Summer was finger-locked palms, shared chuck taylors, orifices filled with liquid sunlight, and a thousand smiling reasons to make art every single day of your life.
Summer was the aching stench of fresh oil paint stains shimmering on every single pair of pants you own, looking up to your favorite artists, and then suddenly realizing they’re living in close quarters everywhere around you.
Summer was the grass blade of distance between two strangers who met online, learned eachother’s life stories, but could not escape the bashful barrier of awkwardness that killed the communication in real life.
Summer was midnight conversations with creative people, delving deep into birth, death, and the breathless expanse of infinity before, after and in between.
Summer was never sleeping earlier than two A. M . because every single day, there was too much to be drawn, too much to be felt, to much to be experienced, too much to be lived, too much to be missed.
Summer was the firey formation of lifelong friendships, extinguished into a melancholic blur as you watch them set sail into an unforgiving marigold sea of futuristic anonymity.
Summer was the million vermillion blisters that formed on your palms when you tried to grip on, as hard as you could to the forty two festive days spent as a student on the campus of Rhode Island School of Design.
Until the last one came.
Counting down the seconds until these moments disappear, you’re standing on the balcony at the top level of your residence hall, letting the rich providence sunset fill your eye sockets to the rim. Buried elbow deep in your semicircle of friends, elbows bumping, fingertips barely touching, eyes slightly moistened, but glowing with the compassion that six weeks of boundless bonding etched deep into these bones.
Then you just run, as if the eastern winds and false sense of freedom could diminish the simple truth that the majority of these people may not ever cross paths with you again. You run face-painted, and barefoot, across the moonlight stained esplanade, the dirt between each cobbled stone caught stiff between your toes, arms and shoulder blades still charcoal-speckled from the topless all-night self-portrait party pulled the night before. Balancing on the railing between the bridge and the canal, with hands outstretched, unafraid to fall. You run to the artist’s ball. Slipping through sauerkraut tangles of hipbone-crashing, young civilians, with butts wiggling in odd directions, you are suddenly enveloped in a tangle of screaming goodbyes and embraces. Each new set of tangled limbs etching ageless memories back into you. Days when there was nothing more exciting than spending eight hours a night making meticulous drawings after drawings in the company of all your friends; young aspirant jewelry designers, film makers, and sculptors they were. Waking up with charcoal cheeks from passing out on life-size self portraits spread on the kitchen floor. Days where the careless beat of you and your best friends trekking, barefoot, across the cobbled streets of Providence, with just a polaroid camera in hand – yanked that swirling firework orchestration of hidden extroversion out of you. An unforgettable level of bonding so radiantly deep that the line between friends and family was just a thin blade of laughter, and homework-procrastination parties evolved into excursions of experimental nude photography. Peering out the windows of your dorm just to smile at the endless rows of windows filled with artists working, friends embracing, strangers changing, in that single gray building that you call home. The sleep-deprived 5 AM exaltation of adding the final slice of serrated cardboard to a thousand-layered chair final project after staying up for three days on end. Clinging on tightly to the final hours as four friends cuddle on a trundle bed, exchanging softspoken goodbyes, fingers tenderly resting on each other’s shoulders. And finally, witnessing the true competitive inspiration of it all as the hidden artistic creations of five hundred fifty design students are revealed in a gigantic tight-knit show.
And you know there was a howling canyon of sentiment left unexpressed, an avalanche of words aching to be said, but some feelings run so deep and dreamlike that they defy all articulation. So you just fall, hand in hand, alive and memory-drenched, with one final collapse on the RISD beach.
On the long flight home, whilst munching on freeze-dried airplane food, you peer through the circular window and gaze at a blazing red horizon where the summer you loved once was. You feel the past due tears well up in your eyes. Because we all know that you can replace the classes, the polaroids, the teachers, the music, the assignments, but you can never replace the friends you made and the feeling. The luminous feeling of the unbelievable freedom that shone through the miles upon miles of exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
So you just smile. You smile at the last art student situated beside you, with earphones split, the song of silence springing through eachother’s ears. The supple silence of shared memories from the same amazing summer that will be sorely missed. Summer two thousand and eight.
There will be journal entries, painstaking paintings, sketches, vignettes, hours upon hours of phone conversations, dreams and false awakenings -- created out of longing. Longing for the rebirth of a summer so pure, so echoic of the passions you embody in the core of your being.
Yet you know it’s far from the end. With hard work and high aspirations the next four years of your life could resonate with the same unforgettable brilliance. It’s just a matter of arriving there.
- Mood:
Questionable - Listening to: to eyes
- Reading: smells
- Watching: tongues
RISD '13
Joy
