My best memories of college so far have been when I’ve acted like a child again.
Going to college is something that everyone associates with adulthood. It’s like some metaphorical gateway to maturity, a place where we’re expected to grow up like suddenly because we moved away from home and took on new freedoms we instantly become the perfect picture of responsibility, but you know what? Fuck that. I am young, but I have been conditioned to feel like eighteen is old age and yet my generation is still so wrapped up in trying to grow up even faster than we already have. Four years is too long to wait for legality so they fake fun through alcohol-induced stupors, drinking to create memories they’ll someday drink to forget.
Going to college is something that everyone associates with adulthood. It’s like some metaphorical gateway to maturity, a place where we’re expected to grow up like suddenly because we moved away from home and took on new freedoms we instantly become the perfect picture of responsibility, but you know what? Fuck that. I am young, but I have been conditioned to feel like eighteen is old age and yet my generation is still so wrapped up in trying to grow up even faster than we already have. Four years is too long to wait for legality so they fake fun through alcohol-induced stupors, drinking to create memories they’ll someday drink to forget.
We haven’t matured in the slightest. Kids still skip classes, trying to find motivation but coming up short time and time again. Students are looking to transfer after month one so they can run away at the first slight sight of a forthcoming problem.
And then there’s me.
I miss drinking chocolate milk through crazy straws and the ease of transforming from five-year-old to ferocious dragon in three seconds flat and the ability to change my mind as much as it suits me. I would take all of that back and trade it for this teen-aged hell in a heartbeat, but that’s not to say I can’t handle the weight of adult responsibilities. That’s not to say I can’t accept that the time will come when maturity is a necessity and not an option. It’s to say that I want to wipe the broken-hearted, strung-out scowls off the faces of my peers like pureed vegetables from the grinning face of a four-toothed toddler and fucking show them what they’re missing. I want to remind them of how happy we were then, because lately that’s all I can think about.
I am clinging desperately to everything I want back from the era of single digits and I am clinging with both five-fingered fists clenched tighter than the stranglehold my lack of inspiration has on me. So I try to surround myself with the joy of sheer, childlike simplicity. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday by jumping in mud puddles and shouting at the moon and letting the rain streak my mascara and knot my hair. I jumped in a huge pile of butter-yellow leaves and walked around with a reminder stuck in my hair for half the day without even realizing and I wouldn’t have given a fuck if I had. I spent a Saturday night watching Winnie the Pooh and I got nightmares from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the first time since I was six and slid down the hill in the courtyard with my friends using jackets as sleds.
Yes, I have felt the burn of cheap whiskey stinging a throat already raw from holding back words I should’ve been said a long time ago and yes, I have modernized my childhood dragon by sucking in smoke and charring my lungs, but my roommate and I jammed on cause Backstreet’s got it and have had it going on for years. Cameron and I reminisced about our favorite childhood television shows and reference Rugrats in regular conversation and Jesse made me laugh until I puked.
These are my best memories, not stumbling through an apartment belonging to someone I’ve never met with fifty of their closest friends, getting so wasted I can’t even remember my last name. These, not letting a junior fuck me but feeling like a grown up for not pushing labels on him because labels are the stuff of high school romances. These. And I have never been more fucking proud of myself.
I refuse to fall victim to this idea that age is a number that can define me. I refuse to believe that this is what life is supposed to be like, because nostalgia has been the only thing keeping me sane in the last few months and I am completely okay with that. And I want you to be okay with that, too; I want to play leapfrog with you and when you trip and skin your knee I’ll help you pick out a Batman band-aid to cover it up with. I want to get lost in the Toys R Us aisles with you while you shop for your next Transformer and later we can play in the sandbox and dig through our teen-aged troubles with miniature shovels and pails and maybe, if you want, we can paint our nails too, and use a different color for every day of the week that we feel alone, just as long as you remember not to forget about me when give in and grow up for good.
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