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if you are five years out of high school, restarting college, and disillusioned with your current classmates, may I offer a word of advice: when putting off the inevitable struggle to fall asleep, for god's sake, do not take out that ID card from your first college that shows you in late august of 2003, a few months from turning nineteen, with the shoulder length hair symmetrically parted and that face you thought looked cocky when it first peered back at you from that plastic, a reflection still.
you will see that the image, no longer exactly your reflection, conveys a desperate air of false self-assurance and wanting to belong. you were already thinking about how you don't actually feel close to anyone who shares your current situation, and you will then contrast that with the people you were tentatively reaching out to then, and how you have strong friendships with them even if you don't talk to them very often anymore.
you will be terribly nostalgic for your first college experience, the green leaves turning colors and falling off the trees, the collegiate gothic revival buildings in pennsylvania schiss you always found so terrifying, lining up to be pelted with candy at parade night, receiving your brilliant green lantern and immediately setting about to fix the pane that the candle exploded, seeing rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, and the voicemail your dad left you one evening, where his words say nothing and his tone of voice says he misses you.
you kept that voicemail the whole rest of the semester, and would play it whenever you got discouraged. you were not yet a disappointment to your parents. you turned a beautifully executed paper in to archy 101, received a 3.9 for it, and inexplicably began to slide off the edge of the earth.
and you will wish so much that you had held on, that your fingers had held you as you threw yourself off that cliff and clawed at the other side. that somewhere in there, you remained just on track enough to pull through every semester and graduate on schedule with your fellow green lantern holders, the class of 2007.
you will reflect on how you could take german, and political philosophy with a warm and dedicated professor who studied under arendt, and any other class that struck your fancy. in class discussions, your random connections were welcomed as valuable insights. and most of all you remember that there was something about the all-female environment that made your bonds with those women you got to know so strong and beautiful and hard to break.
and you will feel as though you have thrown away something too precious to ever be properly described to chase after the idea that if you could be a freshman again, you would be eighteen again, too, and able to rewrite over all your initial mistakes. you will find that you don't even know what you want, or why you're not happy where you are.
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okay
tired
happy
confused
counterproductive and tired
amused
cheerful
sad
unmotivated
nostalgic