I am, among other unemployable qualities, a philosophy student. I have spent a good third of my time here reading and pondering and writing about the nature of knowledge, the persistence of identity, the distribution of resources and the pursuit of an ethically good life.

On this last issue, Aristotle says the quality of a good harpist is their ability to perform well the function of a harpist — that is, playing the harp. If I wish to live as a good human being, I must perform the function of being human well.

Aristotle suggests this function is to live a life of reason, because our ability to reason is what sets us apart from animals and distinguishes us as human. But lives of reason are in rather short supply on a college campus, yet I’ve never met as many people who embrace their humanity than I have in these past four years.

Maybe the greatest way for us to realize our own humanity is not undying obedience to virtue and reason but to simply exist and act as we truly are — to present ourselves to the world exactly as we see ourselves inside our own mind. We may have the ability to reason, but we also have the ability to confess our undying love to a situationship at a house party. 

And so in my short four undergraduate years, I have sought to do as many things as I can to put myself on full vulnerable display to the people whose lives run closest to my own. Most of the 20,000 people at this school have no image of me in their minds at all, and for many of those who do, I’ve had only 200 weeks to sculpt for them an accurate portrait of Thomas Riley. I have met so many unreasonable people and with them done so many unreasonable things.

I hit a teenager repeatedly with my car. I wrestled, kissed and mimed intercourse with my roommate on camera. I tore my vocal cords to shreds rehearsing for the role of Charlie Day in an amateur theater production.

I drank so much that I rode an electric bike across Hot Metal Bridge and then pissed in the woods alongside Bates Street on my way home. I smoked so much that all I could do was sit silently and admire how pleasant a group of people sounds when they’re together for 14 hours and never run out of things to say.

I found someone pretty and froze my fingers off smoking with them on a bleacher in the middle of January just to see them in the moonlight. I drenched myself in sweat to know what it felt like to share a twin mattress with another warm body. I loved so obsessively that I felt I’d be bankrupt for the rest of my life.

I collapsed in a bed exhausted, intoxicated, lusting, crying, fevered or wrapped in someone’s arms. I’ve collapsed in a bed 1,360 times since my first night in Sutherland Hall, and every night that I do I am fascinated by what unreasonable things my friends or acquaintances or enemies might be up to and the manner in which they too will inevitably fall onto their mattresses that night.

In college, you can build a life, filled with the same faces day after day, faces of people you work with, you study with, you laugh and fall in love with. You can build all of this in the span of a year and do it again four times over. The saddest part of it all is not the fact that I will have to leave it all behind in 12 days. It is the fact that I will have to take with me the faces that I can never return to.

There will come a day in the future for every person I’ve met here when I see their face for the final time. Though I will try to spend a lifetime with a select few and squeeze at least a few years out of the ones that live nearby, I am not so naive that I don’t know that for many of these people that I love, that final day may be May 4, or the night that this column is published, or a day that has already passed.

For the people I won’t be able to keep in touch with, the image of me that lives in their mind will be the same image they remember 60 years down the road. When I am old and retired, sitting in a rocking chair and remembering the greatest people of my life, I will not see them as the people they’ll have grown into, working their jobs or raising their grandkids or passing their time at the park. I will see them, 20-somethings, sitting at a large round desk at The Pitt News office. 

No matter where we all go, Spencer Levering will forever be a tenacious news reporter who laughs at every little joke like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard in his life. Alex Jurkuta will forever be a photo guru editing images into the early hours of the morning and commanding the photographers like they’re SEAL Team Six. And Ryleigh Lord will forever be our fearless leader who won’t stop scheduling editorial meetings on Sunday at 2, no matter how often she must run them hungover.

Every person I’ve worked with, every person I’ve loved and every person I’ve ever known has an image in my mind. Some have had hours upon hours each week to be unreasonable and spontaneous and true to themselves to chisel away at the marble and carefully construct their image. Others have only had a half-hour meeting once a week. But whether that sculpture is polished down to the veins or only roughly carved into the vague shape of a human being, each one holds a special place in my heart.

I can’t begin to imagine what parts of myself everyone will take with them once the dust has settled after the chaos of graduation. I have dear memories — of gross basements and blurry night skies and lamplit bedrooms — that I hope the people I shared them with remember just as vividly. But I can’t control what they’ll see when they collapse in their bed some night next year and the image of me crosses their mind.

I cannot bring myself to live a life of perfect reason. I cannot say for sure that the four years I’ve lived here have been ethically “good.” All I can do is allow the people I love to see me as clearly as I see myself. And when they see me for who I am, or remember me for who I was, I hope that in their mind, they see someone good.

Thomas Riley knows they somewhat bastardized Aristotle’s ethics for the sake of this column. Email them about accurate philosophy at [email protected].