driving down the road alone

i have a lot of thoughts going through my head now. some of them can't be written down, for various reasons. but i think a good way to encapsulate them is with the simple phrase: i don't want to grow up. i know, it sounds trite. but i have my reasons. i miss having all of my friends live within a 10 minute walk. i miss campus itself. more than that, i miss the time when the most important and productive use of my time was spent in long conversations that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. not only were such conversations standard, they were essential. when it got windy and i started to feel restless it was perfectly acceptable for me to run around campus, or do laps around the concrete ring around the jesus statue on godquad. i didn't have to be afraid of being alone at night. the weeping tree or the other side of the lake was a standard refuge. i had a refuge. the decisions i made were not ones that were going to affect my entire life. life was still completely open. relationships were still unformed and fluid. friends could be (and for me, were) so much more important than my work. i understood my role in my friends lives, and i think they understood theirs in mine. i didn't have to worry, yet, about them being taken away from me. by distance, by others, by anything. i could still make all those stupid freshman mistakes and, more importantly, have time to fix them.

now, so i don't sound completely negative, starting to enter the grownup world isn't all bad. after all, i do have a cat now. and a fireplace in my apartment. and some very exciting intellectual work that i get to do. but i am afraid of losing (or being made to lose) the personal focus that currently motivates so many of my actions. i am afraid that my friends will be taken away from me. even worse, i am afraid that they will not miss me when they're gone.

i will miss them terribly.