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To write a graduation poem 
Is to write a COVID poem
A poem I never wanted to write
A lamentation to quarantines
Face masks
And ever-changing regulations
A social deterministic determination of my career in undergrad
Wouldn’t it just be sad
To let one silly bug trump your whole plan?
Let it get in the way of your happiness
Strip you of your agency
Because I couldn’t do this since December of 2019
Yes, here.
Stand and speak words into a microphone
Shake and squeeze all the muscles so y’all don’t see
The way I’m shaking like a leaf
While I stutter
And scream and rant
And yet, I let it kill me.

We let this virus maim us
As we attempted to adapt 
To see the world without an eye
Claw our way to the finish line
With online classes
And zero social interaction.
No, I never wanted pity
For the move I made, the decision to step beyond my hometown borders

Because there has always been a choice. 
It was a choice to continue school
When it felt like the world was suffocating me from the inside out
When we were battered and exhausted from long work hours
And dorm pod quarantines
And a ‘return to normalcy’
How could we return to ‘normal’
When we hardly remembered what normal was
Hardly remembered what we were like before this anxiety
Grabbed hold of our guts
When eyes grew wide
And flashed around
At every person without a mask
Or at every judgmental glance.

But we had a choice.
We had a choice when the campus closed
When we packed and left for who knew how long
We had a choice to return
To still make connections
And take in the newly metamorphized scene. 

Graduating still doesn’t feel real.
It feels like something I watch as a movie scene,
Just as I glance at every face in this crowd
and I know so many people.
People I had never met two years ago
Professors that never knew I existed before they saw my name on a roster
We each have those people 
We chose to talk to,
To connect to,
To wrap them in our web of found family to drag them with us as we fall through life
Tripping 
And running
And dancing 
As if we’ve got all the time.

But it’s here.
This moment
Three years after I first enrolled in college
I did not want this to be a COVID poem
But a poem that touched each one of you
As we fell through life together
Wherever we connected
In the classroom
Or beyond
Maybe I’ll meet you for real after 
Once we’ve crossed the finish line
Run into each other in a Starbucks,
Remember the other’s name
And hold that infant connection
Begging it not to die
As this day becomes a memory 
Of all the years we’ve had
And all the year’s taken away
By the virus 
That we let kill us
Just a little
As we survive with this stroke
In our brains
And move on
As a war is being waged
And we sit here. Smiling. Crying—
I’ll cry at least a little
For every interaction
I’ve been blessed with 
And the subtraction of each soul from my daily life
When we cross the stage and bridge our lives
When we cross to the Next stage,
Or chapter if you prefer the book metaphor
Where we think of things as Before and After
Just remember this is not an End.

Because graduating is sometimes sad
This unspeakable
Happy, vibrant sadness
That tinges memories with a sepia haze
Dashing everything with a sprinkling of nostalgia
Wishing for the ‘Good ‘ol Days.’

But this graduation poem
And COVID poem
Intertwined into one
Is a hello and a goodbye
To the life we’ve had
And the one that’s just begun.

So please don’t let this virus
This bug
Or this war
Turn you inside out
Kill you slowly 
Or violently like ant poison
Because you’re a soul we cannot live without. 
Your smile
Deserves to be genuine
And every tear you cry
Is for the good times and the worse times
Until the day we all die.

To the class of 2022
To the class I only just knew
For this moment
We hold in our web
Where we fell through life together
For where our chapters end
Make someone here—your neighbor, your brother,
A recurring character
Because in two and a half years deprived of social interaction
And mental detraction
We know how important it is to hold onto one another
And never let them go.