By Marina Campoy-LoVasco (‘23)

“It’s opposite day.”

That’s what my brother says every once in a while. He says it when he does something mean, and tells me he meant to do the opposite, kind thing. 

What is opposite day though?

The opposite of day is night. The opposite of night is day. But actions and words are not that simple. Sure, sure, there are antonyms and synonyms, but even the dictionary is limited. 

One might disagree and say that an opposite is an opposite is an opposite. What’s the point of disputing topics like that? Especially words that are the base for common agreement. They might make the case that aspects of life are like magnets: they either repel or attract each other, but how many times has human nature disproven that? I swear, so many, too many romance movies begin with the two lovers absolutely despising one another, but somehow at the end, they end up madly in love? 

Do you remember that yellow and gold dress? Or was it blue and black? Did you hear Lanny or did you hear Laurel? We can’t agree on something that’s the same (same dress, same noise), so why have we begun discussing their opposites? 

On an opposite day, is everything opposite? So the floor is the sky, and gravity pulls upwards not down. So you breathe out to breathe in and you close your eyes to see. There are too many variations, too many discrepancies to culminate one position as the antithesis of another. 

Even within the current political system. Republicans and Democrats, so different, yet they share enough similarities so as not to be complete parallels. It’s hard for people on opposing sides to see those shared views, sure, but they do exist. Even within one party, everything and everyone is not the same. Some people lean more towards the right, others more to the left, and still more that find themselves walking straight down the middle. 

That’s why I wonder, when people divide themselves into teams, supporting one character or the other, do they really not see the other side’s point of view at all? Because they’re not really  opposites, rather they are just walking in different directions along the same path. Every once in a while, people should turn around and walk the other way, retrace their steps and see what’s led them there, and check if they still agree. 

And so next time my brother says “It’s opposite day”, I’ll read him this story.