Lilly

Things end faster than they start.

I see one of my high school friends at a track meet. We’re able to talk for a while. She tells me about everything she’s doing, all the fun clubs and events she’s been to on her campus with one of our mutual old friends, and even as I’m laughing and nodding part of me is wondering, Am I missing something? Have I passed on something definitive about college by devoting myself to my work so early?

My old friends are in constant contact, a group chat I remember hearing about last summer but never became a part of. They look older than I remember them in their Facebook profile pictures. They’re changing, shifting away from their past selves, from the people that I knew. But I feel like I have not changed at all; I wear the same clothes I did in high school, throw myself into my work with the same naïve ferocity. Perhaps I’m more introspective, wiser than I was, if only in some small way. At the end of the day, though, my track friend hugs me and says, “The only thing that got me through that race was knowing that I could hug you at the end of it,” and my chest is warm and maybe things are less different than I thought they were.

I declare my double major in mathematics. The chair of the department is pleased with my carefully scheduled plan for the next three years and tells me he’d be happy to serve as my unofficial advisor. “The applied math and computer science departments have been growing exponentially, so it’s always good to have someone walk in and tell me they want to declare pure math,” he says, grinning. I think about the capstone class I want to take with him and the topics course in cryptography I’ll be aiming for next spring and I’m not as scared as I thought I would be. I’m not scared at all—I’m excited. That more than anything tells me I’m on the right track.

Classes are over for the year. I only have one final ahead of me and almost a week to study, so suddenly I have time, copious amounts of it that I haven’t had since the end of last semester. I start reading my textbook for my research internship this summer, I lock the door and dance in my room alone, I blast music in my last half day before quiet hours start for reading week. Everything that seemed unattainable in the past few weeks is completely behind me and I feel, for the first time in months, like I can breathe again. ♦