I guess it’s weird. Forced to move on with the fleeting sunset onto the next day, understanding the semester’s looming end is synonymous to once again getting older. My brain is wired to connect things that way.
The sky is painted in brushes of slight lavender hues and a fading blue. I note the tweeting birds in the encompassing woods.
I’m sitting in my apartment complex’s adirondack chairs watching my neighbors trickle back into the empty lot, once again making it whole at the end of Easter Sunday. The sun’s setting behind my building, those perfectly picturesque scenes this place has adorned me with the past eight months. Why can’t I be grateful for another chapter’s close? Grateful that I got the chance to live within it? Instead — why am I bitter that it has to end, like every other chapter I’ve consciously turned the page on — whether I wanted to or not — whether I liked it or not?
Somehow, I’ll be a senior now. The final summer that I’ll be ‘in school.’ I think a part of life’s journey is that there will always be mourning, it just doesn’t have to be sad. It means bigger is waiting for you, and that chapter was a necessity for you to step even closer toward the greater picture of what’s to come. What no one tells you is that you get to decide whether something you experience will be mentally associated with a certain feeling; like sadness for instance. You don’t control all of what happens to you in life: how you react is where your real power lies. Just not everyone knows it.
I thought only two days ago I was a senior in high school, shaky about the college I’d chosen. I’m grateful I made the wrong decision. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have planted myself in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a place not at all on my 17 year old self’s list of prospective colleges. I needed to choose somewhere I didn’t belong to end up where I ultimately would. And I can no longer imagine my life without the people I have met since.
If it meant I was miserable, made mistakes and learned from them — then I wouldn’t change a thing. If it would cost me relationships and friendships attached to it, then I guess I wouldn’t change a thing, still. I wouldn’t go back. You can have regrets, we all do — but what do you do with those regrets? Wallow over the what-if’s, or decide to choose better for yourself moving ahead?
So now the sun has set and another day’s gone by. I can choose to internally guilt myself for my level of productivity that day — or — I can vow to myself that I did what I could, wake up again and decide to realign my priorities. It’s something we are not entirely prepared for at college’s start when we’re still teenagers. No one tells you how to structure your day, or when to do that task or assignment. Truth is, no one is coming to save you. I’m still learning that and at almost 21 years old, I have a long way to go. But I’m approaching a chapter of tranquility in knowing I’m on a path that I am proud of.
The sun has set, and I’ll wake up again tomorrow, indebted to the sun for continuing to rise when my inner monologue has long cursed it for doing so.