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| Bridget Kim Class of 2019 |
I am lounging comfortably with approximately forty of my
favorite strangers in The Poetry Room, a cozy haven tucked away from the hustle
and bustle of Ekstrom Library. It is a drizzly weeknight that holds the promise
of adventures slightly short of miraculous, and my friends and I enter the world
of anger and passion and the perfect amount of pretension that is a poetry
reading. The poet calls up shameful and sobering images with her resonant,
relatable voice. She is fabulous. She makes me think, but what I am left
mulling over a week later does not seem to be her powerful presentation;
rather, I continue to ponder on what happened right before she began speaking.
It was a small incident. Fairly unremarkable. Laughing with
the gals I came with, my eye happened to fix itself on the book nestled in the
hands of the boy in the third row. The euphoria that overwhelmed me upon
realizing the book was my incontestably favorite one remains difficult to decipher.
I possessed a desire to weep and then sink into a thirteen-hour-long
conversation about the joys of allowing yourself to be torn apart and built
back up by this novel. I made the conscious decision not to act upon that whim
as it is unlikely that any sane person would willingly engage in such a
discussion with a stranger, particularly if she is sobbing wildly.
I settle for an introduction. As I all-too-eagerly hop out
of my chair and thrust my hand and my bibliophile heart out to this guy, I
momentarily consider the eccentricity (for me, at least) of what I am about to
do and I almost sit my behind back down. But I tell myself that this is
precisely how connections are made. Putting oneself in the position to be
vulnerable is how one survives and thrives in communities like the University
of Louisville and the McConnell Scholars Program. Some relationships happen by
chance, but most must be forged by the willingness of one party to initiate. I
swallow my acratic nature and commence to tell this boy that I am in love with
the book he is almost finished with and it changed my life and I have never
seen or heard of anyone else I know reading it and I am glad to meet him. And
then I ask him who his favorite character is. And then I tell him my name, and I give him a chance to tell me his.
It turns out that he is a friend of a friend, and it is
probable that I will never speak to him again; it doesn’t matter. The entirety
of the brief exchange was incredibly impactful. I am two weeks away from
finishing my freshman year of college and I see that I still have so much I
want to do. Reflecting on the interactions I have had this year exposes the number
of times I refrained from seizing opportunities to open myself up the way I
actively do with books. Books don’t hurt you or argue. People do; that is how
we grow. When I get back to my seat, my friends ask me if I know that guy. I
tell them I most certainly do not. But I could, and as long as the opportunity
is there, someday I might.
Bridget Kim is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville studying political science.