In May of 2012, I graduated from college with the best of friends. Commencement week was a blur of celebrations and nostalgia, toasts to the world we built here together, and a mess of excitement and apprehension about the big What’s Next. We lived off of microwave S’mores, Diet Coke and Jim Beam, and an appalling lack of sleep. Hugging one another, whispering goodbyes, we embarked from college and into our true twenties.
It’s been four years, almost, since that time. It feels like yesterday. Those four years have brought us all our own adventures – for me, graduate school and my first professional job. For all of us, broken plans and new dreams, struggles with life and love and the pursuit of happiness. I am very nearly 27, and I have to ask: How in the world did this happen?
Even now, when I think about the four years that were my high school experience, I remember time moving along with a gentle, reassuring thrum of predictability. Days dragged, months dragged further, and the journey to that diploma felt hard-won.
College was a journey in its own right. Embarking from home, discovering the giants in the sky, figuring out who I was. I remember it went faster than I expected, but it felt manageable. They were four epic years (it was cool to say things were ‘epic’ then), and we had ‘done college right.’
But I never did quite get my feet to the rhythm of the past four years. Grad school ripped by underfoot at a breakneck pace, and it feels like I started this job – this new adventure – mere weeks ago.
A secret to the twenty-something years: Life picks up. The train starts ripping forward, and it pays no mind to the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing. Facebook friends begin families, nostalgia channels start playing the shows we grew up to, and memories of our good college years start to sound like our parents’ stories.
michael king 