I’m in the middle of my first official week of summer, but I feel like summer never officially began.
Everyone knows that feeling. It’s the day after your last day of school, you wake up right before noon, and decide to have ice cream for lunch. To a lesser (or maybe further) extend, the feeling of finally “being done” is common among college students.
But what if you never have this feeling? What if everything just blurs together? (Insert intro music that awakens you to the topic for this post.)
The past year of my life has been an accumulation of mixed feelings. A year ago, I was crying in my parents embrace, telling them as they tried to say goodbye that I had made the wrong decision in deciding to spend a summer away from home. Nine months ago, I was finishing up a great internship experience, and preparing for another year at college. Eight months ago I learned one of my closest relatives had cancer, and the next 8 months proved to be the wildest rollercoaster ride of emotions I’ve experienced. My uncle’s cancer, busy school life, no social life, getting engaged (!), planning my wedding (again, !), experiencing the worst homesickness I’ve ever felt, and restarting the same internship I was dreading a short year ago.
So why is everything blurring together? Maybe it’s because that rollercoaster of emotions, specifically within the nine months of the school year, I so often curse was strangely satisfying (aside from the cancer and homesickness). This past year, I’ve found who I believe are true friends, and have kept the ones I always thought would be. I have a new love for some new people, and have grown closer to those I already did.
Choosing to focus on my third year of college, most days, I could NOT wait for it to be done. And then it came time to say goodbye to some friends for the summer, others for longer, and I prayed that the year wouldn’t end. I said ‘goodbye’ to the people I came to love, but only wished that the space pushing us apart would bring us closer.
Maybe that’s the irony in it all. I’d lay in bed at night, talking to my two roommates/best friends about my inner turmoil, and all I could say was that the greatest things in life pass by the quickest. Why must the things we most enjoy and the people we love, aside from all their faults, enter and leave our lives in what feels like a few minutes?
I blame myself for not appreciating the things I miss when they were in the present. I also blame this lack of smooth transition from school to summer to work on me, too. If only I’d given myself more time to adjust, soak in summer’s glory, and reflect…well, I’d be sitting on a deck basking in the May sun as I write this post rather than at my desk at work.
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