At first I laughed. I honestly thought it was a joke. Her sister’s graduation versus a makeup rehearsal. Surely someone would correct her.
Then nobody corrected her.
The day before the ceremony, I sat in my apartment and thought about what to do with the four tickets I had reserved. I thought about asking Amanda from my program, or my coworker at the print shop who had once told me she was proud of me in the casual, sideways way people say true things when they are not trying to be dramatic about it. But there was something in me that still could not quite let go of the empty reserved seats. If I filled them with other people, it would become real in a way I was not ready for.
I left the tickets at will-call and never claimed them.
On Thursday evening, I laid my rented gown across the back of my desk chair and looked at it for a while. It was a standard black academic gown, a little long in the sleeves, with a paper tag still attached to the inside collar that said Tall S. I do not know whose Tall S it had been before. It smelled like cedar and dry-cleaning plastic, the smell of a garment that had held a great many ceremonies and waited to hold more. I ironed it on the kitchen floor because I did not have an ironing board, and then I hung it back on the chair and went to bed.
On Friday evening, I arrived at the auditorium in that rented gown that smelled faintly like someone else’s perfume and storage plastic. My cap had cheap glitter on it because I had decorated it myself at the kitchen table the night before. I had found a tube of craft glue and some gold glitter in the dollar bin at the craft store and spent an hour writing something across the top in my own handwriting, a line my professor had said once in passing that I had written in the margin of my notes: She did it anyway.
The glue had dried unevenly. I loved it anyway.
Around me, families filled the rows with balloons and flowers and signs that said Class of 2026. A little girl kept yelling her brother’s name even though the ceremony had not started. A father in a baseball cap wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. A mother near the aisle held up her phone and whispered, “There she is,” like her daughter was a miracle walking on two legs.
I watched them.
I am not going to pretend that watching them did not hurt. It did. It hurt in the specific way that borrowed light is not the same as your own.
