Howdy.

I’m hiding in the air conditioning from the summer heat that is only just beginning in California. Tragic. Especially when you have to scale a hillside of stairs under the sun to get to class, not sure if you’re having heatstroke or really seeing the shadows of the college kids that were your parents, climbing those same stairs under a different sun.

I suppose you could say that this is about that.

SAME STAIRS, DIFFERENT DECADE

I’m walking up these infamously deathly stairs to get to class today and thinking about how my parents walked up the very same never-ending stairs back when they were in college. Which is weird. It’s trippy to remember that the world existed before you. That your parents existed before you were born, before they were ever parents, that they were just kids in college at one point too.

My mom always talks about how she used to eat spaghetti and meatballs in the dining hall with the guy who would become my father, that they were the best she ever had. And every time I walk past that hall, I picture her at twenty, wearing her college sweatshirt, beaming over her own classes. I picture them as kids, running up and down the same stairs that I am, sweat-drenched and bothered in August. I always heard about these moments growing up, but now I’m the same age that they were. I’m walking across the same campus that they did, the campus that is entirely indifferent to the coincidental strangeness of that. I’m somehow on a level in life that always seemed so much further away than it really was.

UNLOCKING NEW LEVELS OF LIFE

Which is to say, there’s something about growing up that feels a bit like unlocking levels. You hear about these levels all of your life. You watch others ascend them and you know that, eventually, you will too. You don’t know how or when or what it will feel like yet, but you have this general understanding that certain things will happen to you just as they appear to happen to everyone else. Like learning to drive. When you’re a kid, you know you’ll learn how, but it doesn’t seem real yet.

Then you’re sixteen, with your hands still clutching ten and two when the old woman in your passenger seat tears a sheet of paper off of her clipboard and says in the most lifeless voice imaginable “Take this to window eleven”.

Wait, what? I passed?

You passed. Congratulations.

That was perhaps the first time I ever felt it, that feeling of wait, you’re going to let me do what? It was, in retrospect, the first of many moments like that to come. Leaving high school felt like that. Then, starting college. I still remember how odd and magical it felt to only have class for a couple of hours, to be able to go to Target in the middle of a Tuesday instead of having to charm the security guard into letting you sneak off campus to get a coffee during lunch. There was all of this freedom.

The same came with moving out and getting a job and flying to New York alone for the first time. Or going on terrible dates or ordering my first legal drink at a bar. These were things that adults did. And when did I become one of those? I looked around one day and saw myself standing on a level that was miles and miles above the one that driver’s license brought me to and I had not the slightest idea of how I got there.

LEARNING TO SWIM

That’s how I feel right now. Like with every day, I am climbing another step up into this staircase that is about to spit me out into the world. Graduating college feels like one of those things that I can’t believe is about to happen. I can’t believe that they are really letting me do this. Are they really letting me do this?

I imagine other things will feel like this too. Starting a real job. Buying a house. Getting married. Having a child. All of the things that you think you will just know how to do when you’re a kid, but then you grow up and realize that we really are all just jumping into the deep end and learning how to swim along the way. That we are not, in fact infallible creatures once the clock strikes eighteen, nineteen, thirty.

That’s what’s on my mind anyway. That, and the ever-alluring idea of experiencing cool weather during the fall months.

Happy almost-September nonetheless.

Love, m.

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