Approaching graduation brings changes to time

I’m going to come right out and say it: I’m absolutely terrified to graduate. I’ve been impossible to live with these last few weeks. Even in the short amount of time I’ve been able to see my friends, I haven’t been all there mentally.

My mind has been constantly drifting to what I am going to do when school is over for me. I don’t even mean the whole “what is my purpose in life” idea, I’m talking about what am I going to do when life isn’t regulated by the school year?

I probably have ten solid memories from before I started school and even then two or three of them might have occurred after I had started. Everything I know has been based around and dictated by time taught to me by school. Life was given to me in beautiful, bite-sized snacks. It was just enough to handle and when it ran out a new one would begin.

It was like working towards a goal. There was the chunk of school before Labor Day, another leading up to midterms, one leading to Halloween and so on. It all lead up to the ultimate goal: summer vacation. I’m not going to toy with you: LFO wrote that song about me. I am a summer girl. And while the prospect of a summer with my friends with the intoxicating knowledge that we are not minors but are free from the bondage that is formal education, is so wonderful I think I’ll go blind just thinking about it, I’m dreading this one.

The summer before was about sitting back and relaxing until the next school year to come about. It was cyclical for me. How on earth will I keep track of time? When I lived in England, the chunks of time were not the same. There was no Thanksgiving lead up nor was there a fun Halloween. Time moved differently there. It seemed like all I had was time which was good and bad.

It was good because it afforded me the luxury of travel and time to simply sit where I was and be still. It was bad because time slipped through my fingers all too easily so that when my time was up, for several reasons it seemed there would have never been enough.

I have to find some sort of structure to my time because there is really nothing I can do about it short of procuring a flux capacitor and a Delorean. Waiting for Thursday so I can watch “The Office” will only get me maybe three or four more years into the future because, though I loathe to admit it, it will end someday. After that, it will be up to me to actually take the initiative to make up my own little bites of time.