"It's a symbol of the changing times," he told me as a cool breeze whooshed the hair out of my face. Rain drops slowly plopped into contact with my skin. I remember worrying that I forgot my sweatshirt in the car.
"Just do it!" he urged me, clearly under the impression that I would not dare hurl the watermelon in my hands off of the top of the parking garage on which we stood to the empty streets below.
I couldn't tell you exactlyhow we ended up in this position. August 22, 2014 - I remember the date: the night before I moved from my home of the past eighteen years to college, where I would (after much anticipation) begin my life anew. The potential of change swirled through the sticky, humid, summer air like a fog laced with complete euphoria. My skin tasted drops of rain as though they were the only drops of water to quench my dying thirst for adventure. The prospect of adventure has always endlessly fascinated me, and the subject happened to be what I had been writing about in my journal when my friend stumbled into the café situated across the street from this particular parking garage, watermelon in tow.
"There's something so satisfying about smashing a watermelon," I remember telling him slyly with a grin on my face after he had asked me if I wanted the fruit and I had said no. His grin signified a reply of amusement, and the twinkle in his green eyes suggested an air of mischief. Indeed, the gears were turning because somehow, someway, we ended up across the street, on top of this parking garage, watermelon perched on the wall between us as we pondered what seemed to be a distinct moment of truth and clarity.
I'm not sure why I hesitated so long. Had I possessed the opportunity to chuck the fruit off of a parking garage now, I would have done it in a heartbeat because why the hell not, right? Maybe I failed to grasp the weight of the subjectivity that comes with such a monstrous moment in one's life. Or maybe it just came down to the fact that my friend was one hundred percent right: my life was changing, and after eighteen years of the same exact thing day after day, the prospects of newness and difference were completely foreign to me. Or maybe I was worried I would get into trouble (because at eleven o'clock at night in the middle of suburbia, everyone is frequenting back streets behind parking garages, obviously). I cannot be too sure.
My fingertips carressed the smooth, green surface of the melon in a tender way. I cradled it in my arms, almost as if I were a new mother, cooing to her infant child, nursing the infintessimal potential that whirled around, whipping my hair about in the summer night. Suddenly, an immense calm rushed throughout my body, and I chucked the melon off of the roof, its green stripes spiraling with the spin I forced upon it. Down the watermelon fell, gravity pulling it away from the two of us above at an accelerated velocity, ultimately splatting on the damp asphalt below, shattering into thousands of pieces of pink fruity innards. I breathed a sigh of relief and finally succumbed to embracing the serendipity around me as though it were an old friend.
After sleeping for maybe three hours that night, on August 23, 2014, my family and I made the hour and a half trek to my new home at Allegheny College, where I began to create my own life and figure out my reason for existence. (Part of the fun of being at a liberal arts college is having an existential crisis on a bi-weekly basis.) Life then was an almost blank slate, and I had the opportunity to be anyone I desired. My name no longer defined me because I defined myself. Almost two years later, in May of 2016, I find myself at the halfway point between college life and the even more uncertain reality I shall face in due time, and I find myself not wishing to trade any of it for the world because all of this: school, friends, experiences - all the good and the bad - are my world. I've discovered that no matter what road you decide to pave for yourself, you're best to remain one hundred percent yourself because, to be quite honest, none of us have any clue as to what the hell we are doing, and that's part of the fun. But mistakes are also absolutely vital because we learn more about ourselves by merely living, taking a chance and throwing a watermelon off of a roof of a parking garage, rather than standing there, wishing we had done it when we had the chance.
