It's the end of summer and you're ready for school to start. You stuff your brand new folders with clean sheets of paper with perfect lines. You sharpen your pencils or buy mechanical ones. You pick blue or black ink. You get some new clothes to add to your wardrobe and wear it all in the first week of classes. You style your hair a little, change it up a bit. You smile a lot. The air feels fresh and new and full of opportunity. You walk into your new classes with your head high because you feel different. This year will be different. You're ready to own everything, be responsible, stay on top.
And then you lose yourself.
It's the end of the school semester and winter break is starting. You drink heavily because you need the distraction. You wait for your grades and press refresh on your computer or laptop or phone ready to face the results.
Your parents ask how you did. And you wait, and you begin to wonder.
Where did time go? How was the semester over all ready? When did studying become so stressful and when did you last feel like you were in control? Like you knew what you were doing? You want to run, you want to go to a place far away. Because you have no idea what you're doing. Auto pilot has turned off and you want to be somewhere else and make all the decisions and all the right turns but you don't know how.
You look around and everyone else seems fine.
But in the mirror, a stranger stares back at you, with dark circles under their eyes.
You're not even happy anymore. It's all been lost in the text books that put you in debt or the bubbles you filled in during midterms. And part of you panics, but it doesn't even know how.
A blurry week later and it's January- the semester is about to begin.
The air is full of change, and hope, but this time you're not in your seat with a brand new notebook. You're gone.
And you're smiling, wherever you are. You're free.
I can always go back.
