remember me?

Remember me, the girl whose bed you used to have side in and a pillow dedicated solely to you? Remember hugging me until my feet were off the ground and I had to gasp for air? Remember walking in the dark, me guiding you down the dirt path so that you could look up at the meteor shower falling all around us? Remember the bite wars and the fake name calling? Remember flipping off the camera while sneaking into the country club hot tub late at night? I do. I was the girl who took your ecstasy virginity and you were the guy who danced with me down DP and squeezed my fingers on the beach. I was the girl who gave you stupid temporary tattoos and you were the boy who actually wore them, in visible spots I might add.

I was the girl who waited patiently for a month for you while you did your thing in Australia and yet you were the boy who couldn't wait for me while I was home for Christmas for a week. You were the boy who wouldn't tell me why we weren't together while I tortured myself trying to think of reasons for our disconnect. How could a few days change your mind about me so much? Even right now, I try to come up with reasons but remain clueless. Was it something I did? Was it something you felt? Was it someone else?

Didn't it torture you too? Doesn't it hurt you to not talk to the person you liked so much? Doesn't it feel weird to be in the same town and not sleep together at least one night a week? Don't you miss our funny text conversations? Don't you miss me?

to be continued... maybe.

Musings of a college senior

I'm sitting in my usual spot doing my usual thing. My bed, listening to Pretty Lights and messing around on the internet. I just finished my last article of the quarter for my school's paper. I'm about to finish the last novel I'll ever be assigned to read in college. Later, I'm meeting up with some classmates to work on my last group project. See the pattern?

As college comes to an end, I can't help but feel torn. Part of me is so ready to gather up all my essays, readers, and anthologies and ceremoniously throw them in a burning trash can on Del PLaya Drive. I've already started a folder on my computer of old documents I can finally move to Trash. But then I find myself cringing at the thought of all that free space from tons of deleted English essays and I don't know what I'm going to do with my bookshelf once all my assigned novels are burned... I mean sold back. I stand on the brink between the only world I've ever known, academia, and one completely clouded in mystery, adulthood.

Like any college kid, I've been thinking about the position I'm currently in since I first received my acceptance letter. College is the last set in stone plan I've ever had in my young life. I guess I expected over these last four years that something would eventually fall into my lap and I would somehow magically transform from an irresponsible college kid to an adult with a career and a place to live and all the other amenities that come with adulthood (anyone have some health care I can borrow?).

Yet here I am, one week till graduation, with no immediate career goals, living in a house my parents pay for, driving their car, and officially still a dependent on their taxes. On paper, my life after college looks pretty bleak, both definitions, discouraging and empty.

But that self pitying comes to end quickly. Besides working my ass off to graduate a quarter early despite transferring twice (yes, twice), I've had a job since I was 16, balanced play and work, never got into trouble with the law, and pulled it all off with a solid 3.0+ GPA. I have money in the bank, valuable contacts from all over, and, most importantly, four years of memories that will remain with me forever.

What's really keeping me from throwing myself off the cliffs I partied, ran, and played on for the last few years is that I'm only 21. Why should I rush into adulthood when I still have so much of my youth? Maybe I'll backpack through South America or become an au pair in France. Maybe I'll move to New York. Or maybe I'll just stay in Santa Barbara, on this brink between college and adulthood and continue to work, hike, surf, take pictures, go out downtown, and live the same sort of life I live now, minus group projects, assigned reading, scantrons, and essays about things I'm not that interested in anyways.

And hey, if I miss it that bad, there's always grad school (anyone got some financial aid I can borrow?).