I get to watch my friends panic and scramble, as their birthdays roll by, one by one. It’s been a year since most of them graduated; it’s been barely a couple weeks since the one dearest to my heart did. Everybody’s equally lost. Everybody’s a bit at loss on their plans, on their majors. It’s a riot out there. I don’t think I can spend more than a week without hearing some semi-confession of panic, confusion and other existential crises. I try to soothe them. I’m not sure it works.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one in those groups who knows what she wants. Other days, I wake and there’s a vague, but joyous, cloud of confusion wrapping itself around my brain. I become restless. Excited. The world is so large and so full of possibilities. I can do anything. I can go anywhere. I Google stuff and get lost on the tangled web of college possibilities. I like it. I love it, even. It’s fantastic until it somehow comes crashing down one evening, where I’m always convinced I’m stuck in this sticky, dirty city and I see myself miserably spending my life in Miami.
Eventually, though, the initial goals come back to mind and it’s the comfortable feeling of knowing what I’m fighting for, what I’ve lived this year for, what I’ll be working for during those next three tedious years. Maybe I should be scared, but I just can’t force myself to be. After being stuck in a world of no possibilities and no exits for quite a while, I finally have all doors open. I just need to go out and fight. Somehow, what always scared me now sounds like the easy part.