The campuses are like Disney World; there are people cheering and waving, handing out flyers for every club, team, and group you could imagine. The tour takes you to the dinning hall, the lawn with good-looking upperclassmen playing catch with a Frisbee or a football, and the school gym, where the rest of the good-looking upperclassmen are shinier to the incoming freshmen than the workout equipment. And boom. You’re sold on the school before even stepping foot into a lecture center.
Move-in day is just as much of a party, and the party seems to continue for the next few years with a couple of final exams to keep you grounded. Before you know it, you have a life and a home in a city that was once a foreign land. Finally! Roommates become sisters, friends become family, and titles become identity. You figured out when the swipe in lady will let you in the dining hall for free, and you know exactly which professors to take for that full-proof A. You’ve navigated a way to get from your dorm to class with minimal exposure to those brutal winds during the winter months, and you finally lost the freshman fifteen.
And now you have to leave.
What they don’t tell you as they lead you with balloons on the accepted students open house tour, or while they help you carry your boxes into your room on move-in day, is that it’s a Disney World vacation, not a stay at Neverland. As fun as your rendition of Disney World is, whether it was a proposal at Cinderella’s Castle, an adventure through the Tree of Life, or even a fall on the Tower of Terror, the minute you step out of the park, the trip is over. Every character you met becomes a picture, and the rides, safaris, and tours become memories. Weekly waffle nights become a group message, funny videos between roommates become Facebook shares, and that American literature class where you met your best friend gets simplified to a couple of Emerson quotes.
Commencement means, “A beginning, or a start,” but it also means a hell of a lot of goodbyes. It means goodbye to the friends in whom you’ve confided, the roommates who brought toilet paper to the door when you forgot to fill the roll, the fling you swore wouldn’t go anywhere, and the identity you’ve built since the moment you stepped foot on that campus as a wide-eyed high school senior. It’s goodbye to the magic you found in a writing class, in a teammate, in a neighbor down the hall. Even if you’re me, who complained every weekend about missing Staten Island, it’s leaving a home you created all by yourself—a home you built exactly the way you wanted it. And once you take off that graduation robe, nobody cares about that home. It doesn’t matter how many years you spent as a Division One athlete, how many grammatically perfect papers you submitted, or how many volunteer hours you put in to get into that honors society.
You’re most-likely back home, broke, and buried into social media for what’s left of your previous life.
They don’t tell you that.
