When Sunset Was On Wednesday

There are some periods of your life that you look back on and think, how, exactly, did I survive that? For Alejandra, that period was the eight months she spent sleeping on the couch. The couch was located 40 minutes outside of New York City, pushed against the wall of her parents’ two-bedroom apartment. When she slept on it — if you can call it sleeping — its springs shifted beneath her, pulsing like a beat-up organ. Maybe because it was striated and red. Maroon, to be exact. Maroon — a pretty accurate word to describe the situation.

But like the mythical pirates of old, Alejandra could always find a way out when she needed to. Her escape ship came in the form of Harvard’s invitation to live on campus for the spring 2021 semester. In her new dorm, she had a bed. This was an upgrade. Sometimes, though, a bed isn’t enough.

When I met Alejandra for brunch a year later, she shuddered to consider the campus climate back then. Described as “the warmest CS concentrator you’ll ever meet,” Alejandra has a smile that gives beaming a new meaning. Her hair is an evolving shade of colorful — as the multicolor dye shifts and fades, the colors change every week — and her dimples are deep enough to hide galleon coins inside. She carries herself with a grace so forceful, you could cut it with a knife. And to tell her story — let alone to live it — you’d need all the grace you could get. The first in her family to go to college, she left Lima, Peru for the United States when she was 13 years old. She learned this new country’s language fluently by 15, then Japanese to go along with it. A year later, she took the SAT. She was admitted to Harvard the year after that.

After working so hard to get to Harvard, all she wanted to do was to go back. Yet if there’s anything we’ve learned in the past two years, Harvard is not always what it seems. She recalls her spring semester return as being one of the darkest periods of her life. She felt trapped, she says, with no outlet for joy or meaning. One day, she couldn’t make herself sit in front of a computer screen for a moment longer. Seeing that sitting in front of a computer screen is pretty much essential to studying computer science, Alejandra knew she needed out.

A mid-semester leave is never easy. Getting the leave itself is enough is a recipe for burnout — the Ad Board petitions, that phrase alone enough to strike fear into the hearts of any self-respecting Harvard student. Then the hours of administrative conversations where you’re never sure how much of your trauma to reveal, the single digit number of business days to clear your dorm of every trace of you. Then comes finding a place to live, and a way to pay the rent in said place. This takes incredible creativity and grit. And money. “You only ever hear about people who are well off taking a leave,” Alejandra told me. “That’s part of why these stories need to be told.” She’s right. For First Generation Low Income students not able to fall back on Mommy and Daddy’s checkbook (many of the mommies or daddies in question don’t even have a checkbook), everything a leave entails is nearly impossible. It’s even more impossible when you don’t have papers — without them, getting a job or renting a place is unheard of. Now, thanks to Alejandra, we’ve heard of it.

Alejandra is not one to give up. Relentlessly resourceful, she amassed grants and dug into her savings from years of minimum-wage work to put a down payment on a Western Avenue apartment (Cambridge is expensive, but it’s also a sanctuary city). She persuaded her summer internship to give her a job for the remainder of the semester — lucky internship, because Alejandra knows how to hustle far beyond 40 hours a week.

Living alone was new for Alejandra — generally, it’s a privilege only afforded to the privileged. Though naturally shy, she knew something had to be done. So she spent every Sunday scheduling friend dates for the week. It gave her confidence, she reflects, the absurdity of hitting up random people every week for the more above-board version of “you up? [for hanging out this week]?” To her surprise, those people said yes. Before long, she had a whole schedule lined up, walks in the park and breaking into the stadium past midnight, weekly Jefe’s and social sunsets every Wednesday. A birthday party where the floor shook and something caught on fire. The neighbors came over — they joined the party and even gave her two dollars for her birthday.

By the time Alejandra petitioned the Ad Board to come back in the fall, she did so with fresh confidence. She manifested a sense of agency that was always inside her. “I learned that Harvard is not forever,” Alejandra reflects. “So I’d build the experience that mattered with every moment.” And she did — from campus to a couch and beyond.

Muy agradecida a Alejandra Perea Rojas, Adams House ’23

— Abby T. Forbes ’22 is a Philosophy concentrator in Adams House. Her column “The Trades” appears on alternate Fridays.