Caught in Suspension

The summer following your senior year of high school is a strange one. Slowly attachments to your old life break apart, and slowly you begin to root yourself in your new life. Instead of having one massive net of a life, everything intertwined and complimenting each other, life breaks into separated chunks, floating loosely like the pulp in your orange juice.

One chunk is your old friends, who have already begun to float away. Some are gone for weeks at a time on vacations and missions trips. Some are already beginning to leave for real. And the friends that stick around are only half in Rochester – the rest of themselves are making plans for Phase Two, just like you are.

The other chunk is the present. The 8-5, painful job you hold to acquire some money for next year. I spend hours filing and shelving, while time plays tricks on me and refuses to move along naturally. After a few hours of alphabetizing and looking at the clock every five minutes, life becomes the word that you say so many times it looses all meaning.

The last chunk is The Fall. Time spent filling out paperwork, scheduling, and financing. Talking to people you don’t know yet, but will know soon. Buying bedding and pop-up dirty clothes hampers and shower caddies. Scheduling classes, buying books, preparing for a major. Trying to root down something with no definite shape in your mind, trying to crack the code of the future.

It’s not what I expected, and I don’t like it. I thought I would be working all day like all of my friends, and in the evenings we would all get together to make fires and watch movies and shop for dorm supplies together. Then The Change would happen overnight; say goodbye one night and wake up to your new life, ready and waiting for you.

The suspension is hard to deal with. Sometimes it’s ok. Sometimes you can remember “the good old days” and celebrate in them. Sometimes you can look ahead into the future that you know will be good and happy. But that’s the best you can do. I feel like I don’t belong to anything anymore. I’ve always lived in the present, I’ve always soaked up everything the now has to offer me. But all of a sudden there is nothing. Floating unanchored between two lives. It’s quiet and stagnant and lonely, and I was made for noise and moving and friends.

For the first time in my life, summer can’t be over soon enough, and I want school to start. So I can land. So I can belong.