The trip has been booked for months, and you're in the final stretch of classes. It doesn't matter where you're going because it's better than here. There will be white sand and sunshine and an abundance of hot bods to stare at through the new sunglasses you can't wait to wear. It's spring break. Nothing can go wrong.
So you leave for the cruise port, the beach house, the plane: day dreaming of the good times and bad decisions that await. The moment you arrive it's time to let everything go.
What you didn't think about was the difference between prices of liquor at your campus bar and the real world. By the end of the week you check your bill and realize that five daiquiris a day may have been over kill. You also could have lived without the tourist shirt and the overpriced airbrush tattoos.
But it will be worth it right? The room doesn't look too much like you expected. But you have tropical food to make up for lack of luxury. Anything would taste great at this point, you've been avoiding carbs for weeks. In fact maybe a little too great. Somewhere around day four you check yourself out in a rare gap of sobriety and you realize that you've gained anything you lost from pre-break gym craze. So you block it out by drinking some more calories and letting yourself have dessert, because it's still vacation.
At least everyone looks better tan. The tanning itself is a competitive sport. You bring all your bright clothing to accentuate your color and there is no such thing as too much oil. Until it's a few days in and you're starting to get red. But you tell yourself it will fade into a tan. Or at least you hope. But it just gets worse. One of your roomies gets sun poisoning and everyone is peeling. Suddenly you're spending as much on aloe as you are on beer. All the work you do for a few tan-lines will end in your return to school with a shedding face and at best a patchy glow.
But you have the memories of your tan and pictures to prove it. You also have pictures to help fill in a lot of what you don't remember. You thought you would come back with two hundred pictures and lose sleep figuring out which to Instagram first. In reality, you need the approval of every girl to post a bathing suit picture and someone thinks they look fat in each one. So you settle on a headshot with sunglasses and sun hats because you want to please your friends. But there is always that person who doesn't follow the code. As you unpack you'll get the notification of being tagged in 82 pictures, each worse than the last. And don't forget the video they've posted of the cruise ship karaoke that you tried to forget.
Then comes the worst reality check of all: the week long hangover that follows. Teachers should probably know by now that anything taught in the week after spring break is completely irrelevant. There is no hope. But the hangover is a small price to pay for the all the stories. These are the few years we have to be so careless. Chances are you'll spend more money than you planned, you'll drop your phone in the ocean, or get lost. But you have your friends by your side and some time to forget about the real world that's coming too soon. So live it up and soak it in.
