I got into the University of Michigan on my eighteenth birthday after being on the waitlist for a month or two. It was always the school I wanted to go to most, although I don’t think it was ever for a very good reason. It started with the proclamation that I was a Michigan fan in my youth, which had little to do with anything other than the fact that I liked the color blue more than I liked the color green. It deepened when I went to Ann Arbor for the first time, and then more when I was on campus at a summer institute for high school aged musicians. I fell in love with the monotone brick of the music building, the trees all around it, and the round lights that lined the sidewalk. In retrospect, these aren’t very important things, but it felt like they were. I think a lot about how I came to be where I am, and those things are the clearest.
The place was more prevalent in my mind, and not because Michigan has a good music school or because I predicted how successful I would be here. Playing the bassoon became an instinct at some point during high school. I didn’t think about why I was doing it, it was almost like eating or sleeping, just something that you do. I don’t remember ever making a conscious decision about it. I had been through all of the summer intensives, I already knew all of the best professors, it was only a matter of going through the motions and getting in somewhere. I got into Indiana University right away, and that’s where I planned to go, but I just didn’t love the place. It was nice, I liked the professor, but I just didn’t feel the same way standing on that campus as I did on this one. The email that told me that this is where I was going to live for the next four years was the best birthday present I could have asked for, but I really had no idea how lucky I was.
There are a lot of really important things that have happened since then. I have a family and a community here that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I think to some degree, I expected that, but I still find myself surprised by it. I remember the day I met my best friend, Daniel. We ran into each other on the sidewalk, and very awkwardly introduced ourselves. He has dark, curly hair, but it was cropped short then, and he was carrying his bassoon case on his back. I like to tell him that the first thing I ever noticed about him was how pretty his eyes are. They’re kind, and light brown, and they glow in the sunlight. We used to sit next to the Huron River, on top of a lopsided picnic table in the woods, and talk about poetry, and girls, and what color most captures his aura. I honestly don’t know where I would be without him in terms of creativity. He’s one of the most driven and talented people I’ve ever met, and he hypes me up all the time. Just being around him makes me want to do more. Even now, we wake up every morning at 7 a.m. to make coffee and start working together. He and all of my other friends made me fall deeper in love with the University of Michigan. I have this really deep gratitude for the place because it gave me all of these people who mean so much more to me than I ever could have imagined.
This morning, Daniel and our friend Muirne and I went to this diner just up the road. Muirne didn’t want to wake up, but she did, and she was still ready before me. She sort of stumbled into my apartment, looking somewhere in between dazed and stoned, still wearing her pajamas. Daniel waited in his car in the parking lot. It was misty outside, it’s been getting warmer but it was still early so that the patch of mud just at the bottom of the fire escape was frozen. On the way there we listened to “Brujeria.” Daniel mumbled the words, and I tried to join him but mostly just hummed since I don’t speak Spanish. The diner is tucked between a UPS store and a mexican restaurant. There are two waitresses, one of whom reminds me of an estranged family friend that my parents knew in college, and they’re starting to recognize us. This morning, we sat in a booth and discussed how we might look like an odd group, young and coming in at 7:30 on a monday. Something that comes up a lot is the fact that not one person in our close friend group is of the same race. It might be a strange thing to pride ourselves on, but we do. It’s more of a first for me than for anyone else.
Whenever we play Super Smash Bros on teams, there usually ends up, at some point, being a team of Asian people: Pavana, who’s Indian, and Muirne, who’s half Taiwaanese, and then a team of Hispanic people: Daniel, who’s Honduran, and Michael, who’s Mexican. Pavana likes to joke that it’s a race war. Sometimes it’s Muirne and Daniel playing Michael and I, and that’s when Pavana jokes that it’s the straights vs. the gays. We use hetero as an insult. It’s a dynamic that I never really considered until it occurred to me, and now it’s something I think about a lot.
Even in my bassoon studio, during my freshman year over half of the studio was gay, including our professor. It’s a really good environment, and I wonder if something about it was inherently attractive even before I knew anybody here. Just because I’m gay, and being around other gay people feels better than being the only one.
My bassoon professor is one of the most awkward people I’ve ever met, but in an endearing way. He has this really big passion for designer furniture, Stravinski, and baking. He actually told us that there was a point in his career where he had to choose between hosting a popular cooking show in France and teaching bassoon, and he chose teaching bassoon. There’s not much that could better show how much he cares about his job, he goes out of his way for our benefit over and over again.
He’s been trying to teach more music by underrepresented composers, so he had us do this project where we had to pick a piece that represents us and one that represents someone who isn’t like us. When he was explaining the project to us, he used two pieces that he picked for himself, and he told us why he chose them. The whole studio sat in Watkins recital hall at the music school, six feet apart, masked, and he stood at the front of the room, just in front of the piano. The first piece he picked was easy, he’d always loved Stravinsky, so it was by Stravinsky. It was the first piece of solo bassoon music he’d ever bought with his own money. The second piece was harder. He chose one written by a lesbian composer, it was weird and modern and something that he would never choose to play, because it’s just not something that he would like. He could have stopped there, it was clear why he chose it, but he didn’t, he kept going. He sobbed in front of us as he told us his coming out story, how years of built up internalized homophobia made him exceptionally mean and hateful to lesbians. How every meaningful relationship he made when he first came out was ruined by AIDS. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’d ever witnessed, but it was really, really beautiful. It made me more proud to be a part of the studio than I had been before. The fact that he opened up to us like that made it so clear that he was someone we could trust, and I’m so thankful for it that I can’t even put it into words.
If there exists a better environment for building empathy, I’d really like to see it. I like to think that I’ve always been really selfless and empathetic, but whether I have been or not, I can say with a lot of confidence that being here has made me a better person. I don’t think that when I first got here I would do very well being a writing consultant, and there are a lot of reasons for that, but this year, my personal and academic life have collided and cemented themselves together. Because of my friends, I think I’m a more confident and open minded person in general, and I’m finding that making its way into everything I do. I’m working on a project proposal for a podcast about the intersection between spirituality and deep listening, and that’s funny, because the idea came from an actual conversation I casually had with my friends. I can actually talk to my friends about the readings I have in classes and sometimes end up coming away feeling like I took more from those conversations than from a discussion in class.
I talked a lot to Daniel about Gloria Anzuldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, and it opened a discussion about the fact that I was the only person in a room of four who only spoke one language. They were telling me, “Hey you might not speak two languages but you’re much better at English than any of us are,” but I thought that seemed wrong. Three of six people who sat in my living room one night spoke Spanish before they spoke English. One of six only speaks English, and that’s the one we went with. I opened up a hole for myself with that conversation, and now Daniel speaks to me in Spanish all the time, acting confused when I can’t respond, just to mess with me. It’s light hearted, but at the same time, it’s like without realizing it, he’s giving me some idea about what it’s like for someone who can’t speak English in an English speaking world.
There’s nothing I want more than to spend another evening cooking dinner in Pavana and Muirne’s cramped kitchen, with Cheeto, the leukemic cat, precariously perched on top of the fridge. Daniel usually shows up late, but just in time to eat, and then we stand on the fire escape in the balmy wind, and smoke. They’re my family now, but what if I didn’t have them because of something as trivial as a language barrier or because we ended up somewhere else? I don’t know.
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