I’ve felt a very regular urge to vomit since my best friend told me last weekend she plans to graduate early from Duke University, located just a few miles down the road from UNC.
I’ve known my best friend, Cynthia, since my freshman year of high school. She’s caring, über smart and at the very least attempts to be funny. She buys me food when I’m feeling sad, tolerates the onslaught of text messages I send her when I’m in a weird mood and tells me I’m good enough even when I don’t think I am. I’m absolutely terrified to imagine life without her in a tolerable proximity.
So, naturally, it felt like a real punch to my already weak gut when she told me she couldn’t justify $80,000 for another year at Puke — especially when she’d basically almost already completed her degree.
Fuuuuuuuuuuck.
Immediately I flashed back to last semester. I was video chatting with a professor at my school and was in a bit of a sorry state at the time. Essentially I told him, UNC sucks and there’s nothing you could ever do or say that’d change my mind. His reply was: “One day you’re going to forget we even had this conversation, let alone you had this problem.”
It really screws you up inside when you realize the adults in your life were right about stuff and that childhood actually does come to an end and that people leave and things change and you should never take for granted the present moment. Now I look back on myself in December and wonder: what the hell was I even complaining about?
To make things worse, my only other close friend in the area — Anjali, who I have mentioned before on this blog — is also planning on graduating from UNC next spring. She is one of the people I treasure most at this God forsaken institution. It freaks me out realizing that eventually, there won’t be an apartment for me to crash at when I need to bawl my eyes out or someone to eat comfort takeout Indian tandoori wings and saag with when I’m anxious.
When I was in high school, I told every single damn person that my ultimate goal in life was to live unfettered from the chains of stability or comfort. I was obviously a clueless absolute dipshit, because suddenly those two things are what I crave the most. I just want things to be they way they have been. I want to have my friends and family at an arms length distance. I want to spend my time doing whatever I want whenever I want, without worrying there’s no safety net to catch me if I fall.
I told a guy at work the other day that I was having trouble with ‘actual adults’ ghosting my interview requests. The guy asked me how old I was. I’m 20 years old, I answered. He laughed at me between bites of his sandwich.
“Well, I think you should start counting yourself as an adult then,” he said after he swallowed, wiping the crumbs from his mouth with a brown paper napkin.
Shit, I panicked as I turned back to my laptop. He’s right.
My plan for now is to thrust myself into the deep end. If life is going to do me like this — that too, a year earlier than it was supposed to — I’m going to take the reins. Maybe I’ll study abroad in Europe my senior year. Go somewhere that’s not UNC to finish up my last few credit hours. I’m not totally settled on what I’m going to do yet, but want to leave too — because this school isn’t home without the people who made it home.