H.A.G.S.

There's always these little chillen's being carted around Hofstra's campus, trotted out from some nearby daycare center when the weather warms up a bit, and sometimes I want to run up and smack the smiles off their faces and yell I KNOW YOU'RE THREE. BUT PREPARE FOR WHEN YOU GET TARNISHED AND IT'S NOT FUN ANYMORE.

I had no idea that I would become this jaded. There wasn't an inciting event that lured me away from enthused orgiastic acceptance of unfortunate life circumstances, or any riotous fight with a loved one that made me the way I am, but here I am. Anesthetized. Overlooked. Unconscious.

When I'm stuck in traffic now, in the summer, on the Belt Parkway, people roll down their windows and just stew in the muggy heat out there on the asphalt. Lots of old people clutching the wheel and waiting for their exit to crawl by since I live in a "NORC" (naturally-occurring retirement community). We start out sprinting, just kind of racing for an inevitable flag to fly by like a graduation or a marriage, getting there as fast as we can until at some point we see the definitive light at the end of the tunnel and we slow down. We age and we move slowly and we stutter and we forget and we lose ourselves in the marathon. We put up a fight.

It's raining now. Rain always smells like pennies. I walk outside and can smell weird minerals.

I'm transitory. I am aware that we are always transitory, that because we are aging and moving and talking and changing at all times, that we are permanently transitioning from one moment into the next so that we may string together a personal, linear, sequence of events and scrapbook it and call it a life, but I feel especially transitory. Aleatory. Moving without purpose. This part of my life will go undocumented in my scrapbook.

In my french literature class this past semester, these two kids gave a presentation and asked everyone in the class to write out on a notecard what we want to be when we grow up. Yes, phrased like that, in a college course. I instinctively wrote "happy" (which has been my every shooting star/birthday candle/fountain coin/eyelash wish since I was a kid, but don't tell anyone that or it won't come true) and then the people giving the presentation asked who wrote happy. Of course my hand shot up, because I assumed that many people would have answered similarly. They didn't. They were astronauts, forensic anthropologists, dance studio owners, exotic trade derivatives. I was the outlier for just wanting to be happy.

I say things, a lot, I talk real big when it comes to my future, but I gotta say folks, when it comes to graduating college and staring down my identity for the first time, I actually feel like I've just been flung out of slingshot blindfolded and I can't even feel the trajectory. It's scary. It's normal, and expected. Right? We base our entire beings around the confines of some sort of synthesized academic personality and we identify with the people who have chosen the same interests so we conform to create a group, and find our role within this group, which is easier than tackling a larger percentage of the population. It's simple. We categorize. We eke out our identities and build ourselves up within these little microcosms, which just seems like exercises in futility once we have finished school and all of our anthropological attempts at existence return, sunburned, to their separate suburban homes with bidings of a good summer and see you soon. I'm going to miss my friends.

I can't remember everything about college. I mean, I remember these little moments and these big walls, and those people who maybe saw me when most didn't, but mostly I remember the spaces that contained me. That dorm, that bedroom, this one. I remember you and I remember the smiles that glowed in the dark and I remember the bone-crushing exhaustion and I remember pushing through that and I remember momentary connections and that's why I can't stay in New York. Nobody settles down here. No one grows up. Manhattan is a playground. Some people fall in love. I just shatter. At this point, my heart just wants to know it exists.

So, I watch the rain and I bleat out insipid refrains online into nowhere and hope to reach some sort of semi-enlightened catharsis. I mostly feel like an untethered kite. And I'm sorry for that. I'm mostly really sorry for the things I never said. Like thanks. I love you. It's been the best four years of my life.

Here's an irrelevant but currently-listening-to-song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAPzYJprS8