I've been hearing them now for more than a week, sometimes early in the morning, in the afternoon and late into the night. The carts, they're back. The sound is unmistakable as a student tries rolling a third of her wordly possessions across cracked city sidewalks from dorm to apartment, apartment to car, apartment to apartment and back again. I've heard it at the start and end of every semester now for the last three years. Something about it makes me sad in a really strange way I can't explain.

My housemates are all graduating and leaving me behind and it's strange to think that it was only a semester ago I was in London, living with a bunch of freshmen ("freshers", if you will) and now, I am here, living with a bunch of seniors and that's ending too, and a year from now, I'll be the one graduating and I just don't know what to make of it all.

I'm scared to be done, although I can see it being time, moreso than I could a year ago. I just want to know that in the end, there will be something there for me, that I won't simply return to my mother's house to wait out a life of ignored job applications and horrible, horrible office work that has absolutely not relationship to anything I want to be doing. I'm not sure that'll be the case or not.

I got my new licence in the mail the other day—the one that is horizontal and does not say anywhere on it that I am a "junior operator" or "Under 21 until April 23, 2003." It says I am twenty-one and a few weeks, and the only restriction against me is that I can't drive vehicles more than 26,001 lbs. It seems strange now, to think I'm essentially done with crossing age-related barriers, that nobody really gets excited about me and my ID these days, that it's all just kind of over with.

I don't know, I'm scared to grow up, but I'm not sure that I want to stay here forever. Or something.