Eve of Destruction

I just realized that I spend alot of time looking forward or backward in time increments.  Like, for example, counting down by ten minutes the time I have left in class, or by half hours the time I have left at work.  Last year, I counted how many weekends I had to survive between trips home.  And today, I remembered exactly what I was doing one year ago today.  I was going home.  I woke up, had my last Starbucks of the year, walked to the on-campus convenience store one last time, and then headed back to my dorm to play Mahjong and listen to music until my parents arrived.  I ended up packing and moving out at the same time as my ex-roommate, but I don’t remember saying goodbye to her.  I remember eating Wendy’s with my parents, and I remember driving home and having an immediate sense of calming down.  Things could finally settle back into place.  Like freshman year had been a hiccup in the space-time continuum and now my life could go back to the way it was always supposed to be.  I made no forward progress.  It was a lateral, a failed attempt at moving down the field.

And now I’m facing down the end of my second year here and…… all of that, the bad memories, the desperation and unhappiness, everrything has been washed away like dried dirt after a muddy game.  That girl of one year ago today is so foreign to me.  When I see people I knew last year, I’m me, not the girl they knew last year.  I wonder if they’re confused.  I use phrases and mannerisms learned from being around my best friends here, I laugh and question and react un-self-consciously, I talk more and differently.  I keep using the same adjective over and over again to describe how I feel, because sometimes it just overwhelms me; I’m just so lucky.  I’m right now sitting in the same chair I was curled up and crying into back in September, when I was terrified that I was once again making futile laterals in an attempt to get my life going.  The beginning of this year was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced, even moreso than the beginning of freshman year.  Freshman year, I was full of naive hope, completely unaware of how lonely things could get.  Coming  back this year, that’s all I could think about.  Knowing the negative possibilities is wayyyyyyy worse than blindly seeing only the positive possibilities.  However, luckily, I landed with a marvelous roommate, wonderful next-door and across-the-hall neighbors, and generally terrific floormates.  I morphed into a better form of me.  It’s stunning to me still; I’m not quite convinced that freshman year wasn’t just a bad movie I saw, or a three-week camp that went sour.  I can’t believe it was a year, an actual, whole 8-month school year, of my life. 

And now I’m counting in another increment: a week and a day.  That’s how much time I have left here, and it is, once again, scary as hell.  Because this year the sun rose, and I was living mostly in the light of day, but what if I leave this place and come back after almost four months and things have gone dark again?I know atleast that I will have anchors; the friends I have made here will still be here, we’ll just be more spread out, and we’ll have to work a little harder.  And hopefully there will be some wondeful new kids next year, not just nasty slutty people who smell overly-fragrant and puke in the hallways.  I’ve had my share of them.  So, after I live through this next round of time, this weekd and a day, I’ll be counting down again: just a little less than four months.  And then, I come back home.