Nightlife ✓

28 | flower

THIS WAS THE DAY I sent out my secondary application to Columbia.

Each school had different deadlines for applying, so my life had been a consistently stressful carousel of duplicating dozens of application essays and slightly personalising them for each school. Everything was textbook: my application proudly displayed my job as a freelance science writer; I spoke of the practical experience my agriscience and pharmaceutical internships had given me; my personal statement said I'd always wanted a tangible way to change the world for the better—no matter how big or small.

My heart was supposed to be in my chest.

But as I took a mental register of all eleven of the Med programs that had gotten back to me after my primary application, I felt nothing. No weights rolled off my shoulder, nor did my stomach twist tighter into knots. I just thought well, that's done.

Now it was just a matter of waiting. Waiting to see if I'd cleared the chasm. Waiting to see where I would land.

I finished off an article for Natural Affairs about the link between O-negative blood types and the rate of injury mortality, and then found an update was waiting for the code processing app I used to write Python. I'd updated the app many times, but this time something went wrong. My laptop was far hotter than it usually was, and the intense whirring noises coming from its vents unsettled me.

And then a message box popped up on the screen, telling me the update had gone awry. It informed me that the device folders would be uninstalled and the device would be shut down. I could re-download the app to get the newest version.

"No!" I shouted, clutching the sides of my laptop like it was a sentient person. "Fuck!"

This couldn't be happening. I hadn't created an account with the app's servers. I didn't have backups for my coding projects in any cloud storage sites. Python was supposed to be a quick hack for processing my lab data more efficiently; I hadn't expected to fall in love with it. It had just been a hobby, before it became something more.

As such, I never thought much of backing up the code scripts I wrote. I knew I only wrote them to learn the skills behind each project, but those were still important to me. They were records of my entire learning process. They were trials, challenged and successes. Those models were testimony to the things I could create and the things I could change.

Yes, I could replicate the code—probably to an even higher quality than the originals—but I couldn't replicate the things I'd felt. I couldn't replace the frustration behind specific keystrokes. I couldn't replace the satisfaction I felt when that one particular figure finally loaded itself.

My heart hammered as I frantically waited for my laptop screen to turn on again. I could see the panic in my eyes, the thin frames of my glasses, the stern set of my jaw, reflected back at me in the obsidian glass. When my laptop finally restarted, my fingers flew across the keyboard as I tried to re-download the coding app.

It was an arduous twenty minutes. My laptop was still overheated, and it didn't run as quickly as usual. When the installation process was complete, I started the app.

"Thank fuck," I sighed, collapsing back in my chair.

My old projects were still there. From my most recent wave function plots to the very first file I'd ever created, titled simply flower. The functions that Quen and I had jokingly made during my very first attempt to code. The flower with my name inside it.

I felt such a wave of relief that my work was preserved, that my journey was still there for me to revisit at my own leisure. Nothing had ever made me feel so weightless, so hopeful. As the shock of the relief wore off, gratitude edged itself into my heart.