Arcite ‘23+1
My gap year has a good elevator pitch. I moved to a small organic farm in rural Washington state and worked for Habitat for Humanity for 11 months. I’ve repeated that line dozens of times since coming back to Yale.
COVID made a lot of people take time off school. Two-fifths of my class at Yale did, either for one semester or for both. Many Yalies pieced together a house of friends, a city, and an internship into a rough facsimile of college. One friend with dual citizenship and a laptop lived in Paris and worked for Congress. Several friends took months long roadtrips. Many more lived at home.
I worked for Habitat for Humanity in Port Townsend, Washington, an old seaport of 7,000 on the edge of Olympic National Park. My job was to lead volunteers in building affordable housing, all in-person, offline. Weekends I’d hike twenty miles, pitch my tent, put my feet in alpine lakes and hide from bears. I lived on a farm where turkeys ran free among the trees. The sun rose over the Puget Sound and set on the Olympic Mountains.
The responses to my elevator pitch feel good. Wow! and That’s incredible! and a lot of So can you build ME a house?? I get to see my year through someone else’s eyes. Now I feel interesting and impressive. That wasn’t the case last year. But I feel guilty about what’s in my pithy little pitch and what I leave out.
The turkeys shat on everything. Many days I had no one to lead — I was just a carpenter. I drove 111 miles to go on dates. I saw friends my own age about every two months. Sometimes, I was depressed. I was nearly always lonely. And I always wished I was back at Yale.
After returning to Yale, “The Knight’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales was the first thing I read for class. Palamon and Arcite are friends and cousins imprisoned in Athens. From afar, they both fall in love with Emily. In their jealousy, They turn against each other. Arcite escapes to a forced exile. Palamon envies his freedom, imagining that he’s already won Emily. Arcite thinks Palamon has the better lot: at least he’s still close to her. When Palamon escapes and they meet again, they try to kill each other. They forget their bonds of brotherhood. They forget why they were imprisoned. Their deep unhappiness, their desire for Emily, their jealousy of the other is all that’s left.
I kept up with friends via ZOOM, via text, via Instagram. We heard fragments of each other's lives. The moments worth sharing, not everything in between. I saw people in LA meet new people and go out on the town. Friends going on dates, falling in love. Big, sprawling groups of Yalies basking in the New Haven sun. I questioned the choices I’d made. I started thinking I wasn’t capable of doing what they did.
I posted photos of glaciers, rainforest, ocean. I told my friends stories about crazy coworkers, crazy farm animals, crazy hikes. Weekend road trips to visit friends. Houses being built with my own two hands. I’m working on showing that version to myself, not just other people.
Arcite envied Palamon because he had the thing that would make Arcite’s life complete. Palamon envied Arcite for the same reason. That’s what humans do. We assume that someone who has the thing that would make us happy must be happy themselves. But we each have different issues, our own reasons we can’t find peace. We see other people holding the final pieces of our own puzzles, without noticing what’s missing from theirs. But none of us has Emily.
By Sam Bezilla.
