It was a frantic rush in the end, the cabs, the luggage, the confused parents rolling carts everywhere. A busy street corner with two cabs waiting with meters running is not really an ideal place for a goodbye.

But it was how it was, the quick hugs, the hurried shove of bags and the last minute "Wait-you-forgot-your-keys".

You don't live here anymore. This isn't your room.

Last night, I pulled down all the posters off my walls and the curtains off my windows. I'd already packed a lot (and I have until six tonight) but somehow, it still felt like I was going to be staying too long. It looked to much like my dorm has looked for the last few months, a bedroom that someone lives in.

After pushing, pulling and willing five loads of those damn rolly carts four blocks down 37th, then up one block to 38th almost all of my friends' worldly possessions had left their rooms, or were neatly packed away in boxes and suitcases waiting to go home. It just didn't seem right that my room looked like it always had.

So I tore down the posters, threw more things in boxes and did what I could to turn a bedroom into a summer camp bunk. We sat around in a room for hours, spartanly furnished with sheets and a few boxes and suitcases last night. Drinking and talking and realizing but not quite realizing how much had gone by.

I am half terrified of going home because I don't know how I am going to react. I'm afraid of this strange, intangible feeling that sometimes seeps into my moods when I'm home. I feel very small, very much not in control and very useless. Sometimes, anyway.

Then again, there are the times here when I feel so bitter, so annoyed with people, I mean, I really want to hurt them. I form abstract definitions of what I believe a "real person" is and judge people by my standards, even though I know it's not really fair. But a lot of people seem so fake so much of the time. At least, I tell myself, people at home are real. I think they are, anyway.

There are half-packed boxes all around me and moving in seems so recent now, granted, so long ago and so much has changed since then, but oh how fast it went. I am scared at how fast time is flying by now — is it just me, or really, did this past year slip through my fingertips when I wasn't looking? This is one quarter — twenty-five percent — of college. Gone.

I feel like it's senior year all over again and I'm listening to what was my junior prom theme on my computer (Bob Seger's "We've got Tonight" — I'm sure there's a good chance that at some point, it was your prom theme too) and this is getting to be a little much. (I consider attending my high school's graduation for a moment and know this is definately getting too dramatic. Maybe I will stop by to visit. But graduation? Once through was enough suffering for a lifetime, I am sure.)

There are only three and a half months seperating me from anxiety over tests and late nights studying and frustration and melodramatic cries of "I am dropping out of school!" And there will be six (five, discounting a possible semester in London) more semesters of that to face.

And now, as I finish my last lunch of freshman year and longingly wish that the crepe truck would become a chain event (I suppose they would probably first want to open an actual store, not just a food truck) I tell myself to cheer up, that things will be ok and you'll be back sooner than you think.

Goodbye School. I'll miss you.

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Replies: 3

Posted by stef @ 05/11/2001 03:15 PM EST

Aww.. Caroline! That almost brought tears to my eyes and I'm still a junior in HS. I love the way you write. You make me want to grow up and experience things. You'll be back at Penn next year! Cheer up!

Posted by Melissa @ 05/12/2001 06:45 PM EST

The crepe truck is indeed an excellent establishment. I'm partial to the "Ali Baba: Magic Food" truck, myself.

Posted by Brendan @ 05/14/2001 09:57 PM EST