Last night was a big night for me. It’s not like I didn’t see it coming, but it happened so anticlimactically that by the time it was over, I had almost convinced myself it never happened at all.
But it did happen. The moment passed. That bottle of body wash I bought from the Yale Bookstore at the beginning of freshman year? The cherry-blossom-scented one? The one that awaited me in my moldy little shower caddy when I came home from my first Yale midterms, club acceptances, stinging rejections—hell, that body wash got me through an entire summer in Madrid and still made it to sophomore FWOC. Well, I used the very last of it in the shower last night like it was any other fungible bottle of $5.00 Yale Bookstore body wash.
“Why did it take you a full year to go through one bottle of body wash, Dersu?” Nope. I’m not answering that. That’s not what this article is about. I anticipated running out of body wash, so I went to Gheav last night and bought the “Method Peony Rosewater Pink Sea-Salt Pure Peace Body Wash.” Full fucking government name, I know. (On a side note, Gheav really needs to deflate prices, because I spent $23.00 on just the body wash and two Barebells cookie dough protein bars.) Anyways, I could feel the transformational nature of my purchase as I was making it, but Juan was so efficient (great cashier, five stars) that I didn’t have time to process the symbolism. The same thing happened in the shower as I watched the last bubble of my beloved cherry-blossom shower gel slip from the mouth of its bottle and onto my exfoliating bath sheet (which I replace at reasonable and hygienic intervals, by the way). Point being, the whole situation put me in a reflective mood, and since I didn’t get the opportunity to formally reflect in the moment, I will do so here.
Milestones like these are bound to bring up complicated emotions, so this article is an immortalization of everything my cherry-blossom body wash and I faced together. A catalog of how we started, how we’re ending, and all the pivotal showers (and, like, character growth) in between.
So how did we start, exactly? I actually want to tell this story from the middle, so let’s jump straight to first-year winter break back home in Alaska. Except I wasn’t at my home when this realization occurred to me. I was in my ex-situationship’s home across town, and he had on the same fucking playlist that we had listened to every time I came over for the past, like, two years? He was musically stunted. Maybe spiritually stunted, too. Maybe he was just plain stunted. Don’t get me wrong, I love Creedence Clearwater Revival and Red Hot Chili Peppers as much as the next guy, but four months into college, my Spotify homepage took a sharp turn toward Charli xcx, Troye Sivan, and Bad Bunny.
Does this mean I changed fundamentally as a person? No. Does it mean I got, like, way gayer? I’ll let you decide. I think, primarily, it means I did what I was supposed to do in college. I explored some shit, experimented a bit, and came back with different tastes and a new understanding of myself. Some things (like my music taste) shifted. Other things (like my body wash) stayed consistent.
Let me give you another example. Move-in day 2025: Dersu Seater’s suitcases are double his weight and barely fit in the UberXL. Okay, too far back… Dersu Seater is drunk in Ldub several nights later, introducing himself to every person in the world. When people ask, he tells them he’s probably majoring in EP&E and wants to go to law school. Fast forward: Dersu Seater has Credit/D/Failed Intro Micro and is settling into the idea of majoring in Political Science. Give it a few weeks… Dersu Seater overhears a Poli Sci major in the JE buttery acting like the politics messiah and is irreparably alienated from the department. Spring semester: Dersu Seater declares as an English major to get preference for ENGL 1027. Present day: Dersu Seater just dropped Fiction Writing to take a Cinematography class and has no fucking clue what he’s doing.
But he’s highkey chill with that. Because he knows how it is. I know how it is. You come to Yale with this great unwavering perception of yourself and these great unwavering plans for the future. You just graduated high school and got into an Ivy League—how could you possibly not know who you are after all that? You wrote your Common App essay for God’s sake! Of course you know who you are! Take it from someone who had a bisexual identity crisis in Spain this summer: you don’t have a fucking clue.
This is a tough pill to swallow. Like, a huge pill. Like you might choke on it and have to drink a whole water bottle just to get it down, and there’s probably gonna be some residue and a bad aftertaste in your mouth if and when you finally make it happen. But once you do, it’s kind of liberating. It means you aren’t stuck in any boxes just yet. You aren’t at the stage in your life where you’re gonna listen to the same playlist of thirty songs over and over again. You’re still out there hunting for more music. Gayer or straighter or more bisexual music—who cares—you’ll figure it out for real later. Now is the time to listen to it all and not decide what you like or what that says about you or what you want to listen to more in the future.
So where does that leave me and my cherry-blossom body wash? It leaves us more confused, but freer than we were when we started. We had a good run, too, from the Vandy Basement shower to the Morse Eleven Pack. But I guess I’m ready to toss the bottle, because I know that body wash defines me about as much as my major, my music taste, or whatever the fuck I did this summer—which is to say, not at all. Majors change. Music tastes change. Sometimes sexual orientations change, often while abroad, in really self-concept-bending, life-disrupting ways. Essentially, you can’t use the same bottle of body wash for the rest of your life (theoretically, you could, but you seriously shouldn’t). Now, it’s time for a new era. The era of “Method Peony Rosewater Pink Sea-Salt Pure Peace Body Wash.” Or maybe “the era of self-assurance in the unknown, wearing glittery eye makeup to parties, and not greening out every time you try weed.”
I don’t know. I’ll figure it out later.
