By: Serenity Anderson, Follow South Jersey Intern
The first thing you want to do during your last summer before college is to celebrate. No more waking up at 6:30 a.m.. No more SAT re-retakes. And no more raising your hand to go to the bathroom (because, seriously, what even is that?). You’re moving on and leaving behind the stresses and limitations of high school, of being a kid, and moving on to college – the best years of your life. You’re basically an adult now which basically means you know everything and you know that this will be the best summer of your life.
What comes is hanging out with your friends. This will consist of long drives nowhere, window shopping at your local mall, lounging around each other’s rooms exchanging inside jokes over that one movie you’ve seen enough times to quote, and the spontaneous, ritualistic burning of everything that reminds you of AP Chemistry.
Then there are a few more points to consider:
- Relish in knowing you’ll never have to solve for equilibrium ever again.
- Get a new style. Create the Pinterest boards. Finally have that totally hot, hot girl summer you’ve been putting off for two years now.
- Try not to think too much of your impending doom as a engineering-slash-business-slash-econ-slash I want to make my father proud major.
- Contact your roommate.
- Attempt to decipher the group photo of the Instagram profile picture they give you to see if they’re also Black. Not that it matters (it totally, totally does though).
- Confess to your crush because why not.
- Regret this.
- Spiral.
- Realize that you will be fine, it’ll get better with time, you deserve someone who likes you for you– all those cliches. It’s not even like you’re going to see half of the people from high school again anyways, so who cares! Maybe even some of your friends will be in that half of people.
- Pick a new hobby. You’ve always wanted to try skating or teach yourself how to crochet. Maybe you can create an entirely new wardrobe this summer that’ll go with the New You™.
- Make that hot girl summer become a lazy girl summer when you catch yourself waking up everyday around 1 p.m.
- Oh yeah, start thinking about the New You ™, who you want to be next year. This is your fresh start after all.
But don’t freak out. Because why would you freak out? What’s there to freak out about being away from home for the first time ever and supposedly knowing what you want to do for the rest of your life and leaving behind your friends and getting your first actual job and sharing a room with a stranger and paying for groceries and doing very complicated adult things when you’re not even 100% sure how to use an ATM machine?
See, nothing to freak out about!
Your last month becomes a series of goodbyes to things and people you never really considered yourself missing in the first place. Your room. Your favorite soul food spot down the corner. The group of old Hispanic ladies that gossip in Spanglish outside your apartment.
Say goodbye to your mom first. Watch her from the kitchen table making you pancakes and notice for the first time that she’s getting older, that she’ll keep getting older and growing and changing even when you’re not there. So will your siblings. And your friends.
And your cat.
The one you weren’t expecting was saying goodbye to yourself. Because saying goodbye to your life is like shedding old skin. You look in the mirror and suddenly catch hints of a woman if you blink fast enough.
Let all that excitement and fear and longing eat away at you all at once and spend that last night of summer in your own bed, thinking too much in the best-worst way, ready for whatever tomorrow brings and the adventures that await.
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