McGill Downtown Campus & Sounds of Anxiety

The last exam of my undergrad was an oral exam for a phenomenology class in April, 2019. In college, Aprils always felt sped up, like the final lap in Mario Kart when the music accelerates and you realize you haven’t finished packing or said goodbye to people who you know you won’t be seeing for years. As per tradition, I kept off studying until a feeling of guilt overpowered all my senses. This time it came at a personal record-setting time of a just a day before.

I’ve always come out relatively unscathed when the exam marks came out or when I came down from taking whatever substances fell into my lap, and thought this time would be no different. In the afternoon before the exam day, I took the last pills that I ever wanted to take to power through the entirety of the course text in a final attempt to make some sense of it. The exam would come at noon, and after staying up all night, I chugged a redbull in the morning for good measure, said bye to my roommate D, and left for campus. It was still nippy outside, but you could tell summer was creeping near by the way students asked each other about vacation plans and made promises to meet up at places they’d never considered going for real.

Up the Leacock building elevators, I said hi to two other students waiting outside the exam room. We made small talk about what the prof might ask us, while I spent most of my attention trying to imagine what the backs of their heads looked like and where they sat in class. They were pretty, and had beautifully highlighted notes typed up on their macbooks resting on top of all kinds of sheets & print-outs. My notes were crumpled and scarce. Feeling embarrassed, I sat crossed-legged at some distance away, using my notes as a cushion against the cold floor and letting my mind drift instead of studying.

The air suddenly felt heavy. Every stimulant & neurotransmitter in my body seem to have halted as soon as I became stationary. I thought about if this is it. I thought about if all the numbers and words I wrote down in the past 6 years will be sufficiently rewarded and which hand the prof will pat me on the back with. I thought about college being over and finally getting closure to say goodbye to fantasies of inventing the next internet or discovering perpetual energy and ending up on the Ellen DeGeneres show.

It felt beyond disorientating. To convince my mind that the hallways weren’t contracting and expanding like the motions of a worm, I tried to find a spot on the floor to rest my gaze on. The entire hallway was simultaneously dim and blinding, with no middle ground to be found between the bright incandescent spotlights and the lulling dark that lied just outside of the their borders. Someone called my name. I instinctively stood up and found the prof’s extended arm, waiting for a handshake. He was friendly and articulate, and I was the opposite. To save me from total disgrace, he gave all sorts of hints just to have me pronounce the keywords in order to toss me some marks, going as far as telling me words that rhymed with them. I felt the part of my brain moving my lips shut down and stumbled every word. He asked about my major and ethnicity, and took pity that a bumbling Chinese engineer decided to take his course. The exam finished in a half hour, and I left without a pat on the back.

Experimental Results

In the moment I stepped out of the room, I remember feeling empty and transparent, like a climax-less used condom, carelessly tossed in the corner of a hotel room for someone else to clean up. I took the elevators down on autopilot and stood outside the doors, unable to make myself walk home because that would’ve meant the end.

Life after graduation had been an afterthought. It was something carelessly dreamed up, like promising to meet up for drinks with an old lab partner than you ran into. I had expected a new, educated person with different hopes & wants, but I never thought to ask myself what they would be.

In a state of indecision, I sat on a bench beside the door that may or may not have already been occupied. I stared directly ahead onto lower field for the next while, and saw only moving, indiscernible shapes. The weather was comically clement, blowing a slightly chilled wind against my perspiring mess of anatomy. I was content being held and patted by the breeze. I let it come near and whisper comforting things into my ears, telling me that I had done alright. I thought if I sat there for longer and forever, I’d melt into the wind and have my soul & thoughts effortlessly carried away to every niche of the world, free of my body & decisions. I liked that idea.

About 20 minutes past, the shadow of something resembling a person snapped me out of my melting. I didn’t see her walking towards or hear her saying hi until she was immediately in front of me. At that instance, I caught my hands fishing into my bag for a cigarette. I didn’t really smoke, but found the idea of having a cigarette after an ordeal to be comforting. The shadow belonged to my friend J, and she walked me home while listening to my blurb about recent finals and job hunting. She had a talent for making everything seem okay, and I felt it working while hearing myself talk in the future tense and use words such as “hope” & “want”.

D was making lunch or breakfast at home, clearly taking it easy that day. We joked about kitchen objects while I sat on our stained bar stool that the previous tenants left behind and watched him cook. The almost-summer sun was starting to shine through the curtain-less windows. It told me to let my body and mind drop all the weight they had been carrying. I started to drift into unconsciousness in an upright position, with my mass made buoyant by the now warmer breeze. Before I gave in completely to sleep, D offered me a cigarette and we smoked in silence. It was fucking bliss. Years of exposure to non-smoking campaigns and medical facts did not prepare me for it.

In my half lucid dream on that stool, I remembered Heidegger saying something along the lines of anxiety being the first step in realizing your authentic self. It was suppose to be a wake-up call to save you from the sea of the mindless routines found in your cozily inhabited world. With my eyes closed, I turned to my sense of hearing and thought about what instances of monotony were broken by sound. I remembered being nervous at parties around people I didn’t know, hearing sounds of strangers shouting over each other and ping-pong balls dropping on the ground. I remembered the muffled sounds of the orchestra warming up before a show, raising all kinds of goose bumps while I waited backstage. They might not have been anxious moods, but they were moods coloured enough to snap me out of taking the current environment for granted. I really wish I had documented the breeze outside Leacock that day. To compensate, I present herein some sounds of my McGill that I’ve preserved, lest they permanently dissipate into some noise of the past.