a year ago today

i'm leaving for california in five days. five days of mom, dad, brother, friends, and the carolina blue sky. five days of sleeping on a plush mattress and waking up entangled in waves of pottery barn. five days of taking five steps to my own bathroom and fifteen steps to the laundry room. yes, i place a lot of value on these two rooms.

at this very moment in time i am feeling extremely excited for the upcoming move; however, i have had my share of emotional, pessimistic, and fearful moments these past few weeks. some days i just get overwhelmed thinking about how many people i've disclosed my dreams to...overwhelmed with the possibility that i won't have the answers i want by the end of the summer...overwhelmed by the thought of sharing one tiny bathroom with four people. two boys and two girls. i repeat: two boys and two girls.

i'm the kind of person who is really affected by my surroundings, a fact about myself that i realized when i took that trip to florida last fall. i actually thought i was going to move out of my parents house and happily reside in the sunshine state--that is, until the pastel-colored buildings started to make me queasy. and i realized that i much preferred the way that california beaches fuse with the surrounding community. let's just say i made a very smart choice by ending my plan to move there.

so yes, i'm feeling nervous about the whole moving across the country to pursue my passion thing. but i also know that my angst is coupled with the tendency i have to think back to what i was doing exactly a year ago today. a year ago today i was in the atlantic ocean. alright, i was on a cruise ship in the atlantic ocean...headed for bermuda with three of my college roommates. i was dancing my ass off with bob--a man so old he might've been a ghost--and other elderly folk because, unbeknownst to us, we had signed up for a senior citizen cruise. a year ago today i was lying in bed in our cabin, missing my current boyfriend and contemplating how it would feel to graduate from college. what a different place i was in. what a different place all those seniors are in right now. i hope they are cherishing their last days together because you can never go back. you can try and re-live the "glory days" but it will never be the same. when i graduated from high school i knew that the day i became a graduate and walked off campus was also the day i would lose that special sense of ownership with my school. that gym, that track, that quad--they will always be a part of me, but they will never feel the same way as they once did when i ran suicides up and down that gym, ran laps around that track, and self-consciously made my way back and forth across that quad. and the same goes for college.

such is life. i don't know which we should dread more: the nostalgia that comes with a year ago today or the anxiety that comes with today a year from now. pick your poison.