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On the threshold

I’m still here. That is, I haven’t left for college yet. That will be tomorrow. Yesterday, my friend Luke asked in his typical, blunt manner: “Is your life in boxes yet?” To answer this properly, allow me to wax poetic. After that, I’ll wane poetic.

By last night, most of my stuff was indeed in boxes and bags. Not exactly my life, but close. I’ve been packing more things that I could have imagined, but it hasn’t taken up very much space. That’s not really what I’m getting at, though. Everyone I know has his or her life in boxes right now. We’re all starting in colleges all over the place, from down the street to across the country. Everyone is going through the same things as I am, and that makes me feel a little bit better.

I used to be really bad about change. I’m still pretty bad about it. I remember being in eighth grade and checking out high schools when the question of college came up. I didn’t even want to hear the word. High school was enough for me to handle, thank you very much. Now, high school is out of the way. That alone is hard enough to believe, but it’s true. That chapter of my life, it seems, is over. College used to be a big, scary thing, but now it’s not — not as much, at least. I’ve remembered the words that have helped me out in the past: If anyone can do it, so can I.

Okay, it’s true that not everybody has what it takes to finish college, but a lot of people more mediocre than I have managed to pull it off. And I’m a pretty diligent worker, if I do say so myself. But again, it helps me to know that going to college is something that (almost) everybody does. It’s almost like an adventure. They say your college years are the best of your life. I don’t know who they are, or you, for that matter, but maybe they’re right. I envision myself meeting cool people and having fun.

I once that thought that I’d be a goldfish in the ocean of college. I’d used this metaphor in the past to describe the experience of starting high school, and I had quickly regretted not explaining it. I now know, of course, that it needs no explanation. But the ocean of high school quickly shrank to a pond, and I realized that I had a school of fish around me. I had forgotten that we are social fish. We are fish who depend on one another. And I now realize that when the pond grows to the size of, say, Lake Superior — when I have a sea of new challenges to face — my school of fish is there to help me like never before. Case in point: my mom casually mentioned that when I ran out of cotton balls, she would send more. I was dumbstruck. Send me more cotton balls? In the mail? But I can just walk to the store and buy them myself.

The point is, my parents are there to help me as much as they can. They know I’ve fallen on relatively hard times. Even with my full scholarship, I’ve had to take out loans to get by. Everyone else I know wants to help. My sister and I had our last day of work today. They got us a cookie cake — a giant, greasy chocolate chip cookie with icing on top. Oh yes. And “the new girl,” whom we haven’t known for more than a month, asked for our addresses so she could send care packages — the occasional packages of basic goods for college students who often can’t afford or simply would rather not go out and buy them. Wow. Whether or not she actually sends anything is beside the point: we hardly knew her, and she cared.

I had thought that, once you were in college, you were independent from everyone, and that was it. Today, it struck me that independence is not a Boolean. That is, it’s not a true/false, either/or type of thing. Someone named John once said that no man is an island, and he was right. Right now, I’m very dependent, and over time, I’ll become more and more independent. Everyone is there to make the transition easier. I’ve often wondered how old I’d have to be for the phrase “in my whole life” to stop sounding ridiculous. I am, after all, a n00b at life. With lessons like this, I’ll someday become 1337.

And for those of you who had to click on the Wikipedia links, what an anticlimax that was. I guess I started waning poetic too early. And now, the links.

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