Lilly

Sometime in the next two weeks I will finally decide where I’m going to spend the next four years of my life.

I’ve been thinking about where I’m going so much that I’m neglecting where I am right now. An English paper sits unfinished in an open tab in my browser, but another tab holds a sample schedule I constructed—should I end up at my top choice school—neatly laid out in a spreadsheet, detailed with class times and lab hours and notes like “Spanish or Russian?” and “replace with ASTR 113 if I test out of calc.” Laying it all out like that makes the future seem very real but at the same time not real enough, because I still have all of these other responsibilities weighing on my shoulders for the next month or so. I’m not at a point yet where I can just say “screw it” to my next soccer game or calculus test. Or English paper.

I visit that same school of my timetable dreams, do my first overnight on campus. The math professor I meet with is delighted to recommend his department’s data science minor to complement an astronomy major, and is overjoyed to discover that I have surpassed the school’s three-semester calculus curriculum. “You’ve already covered vector calculus?” he demands. I nod. “Sequences and series?” Another nod. “I’ll have to get you in touch with the chair of the department. This could open up a slot for you to take my statistical modeling class,” he hints. His last name is the same as my birthstone. Maybe it’s fate.

I get an extension on the English paper.

The National Women’s Soccer League kicks off its fourth season, marking the first time that a women’s professional organization has lasted more than three years in the U.S. While I’m on my college visit, my own soccer team takes a bus two hours out of town to beat some poor team 11-0.

“Senior night is May, 5!” someone says cheerfully. And everything will go from there: prom, our senior trip, graduation. Maybe it’ll finally be real enough when I can throw my cap in the air and say I’m done, done for good, done with this school and this town and this final crushing month. ♦