I'm about to finish out my second year of college here at John Brown University. I will be a sophomore no more. This milestone follows a year of ludicrous spending, suffocating freedom, and poor rooming decisions. My end here follows the very recent end of a comic called Homestuck.
On April 13th, 2009, Andrew Hussie started a new webcomic on his website MS Paint Adventures. The comic featured a birthday boy who was trapped in his room and his three internet friends. The boy was turning thirteen, and they were all scheduled to play a game together.
This sounds like a stupid premise for a webcomic, and many would think that it was, but seven years, several non-linear story threads, and many character deaths and resurrections later (this comic got crazy), Hussie finished his opus. People cried, sure. Wrote alternate endings, yeah, but the fact is that the comic ended, and not much could or would be done to change that.
Why am I writing about this? Well, when I hopped on around 2012, the comic's fanbase was exploding across the internet. I clicked a link looking for Homestar Runner, and Homestuck is what I got instead. Hussie's comic formed me through a very tough time while living with an alcoholic and beginning my struggles with self-harm. I find it to be a strangely comforting thought that my time with Homestuck began with my sophomore year in high school and ended with my sophomore year in college.
I watched the end, of course. All twenty minutes of it, and, as I did, I felt that old kid in me, getting excited at the thumping music and the stellar animations, but when it was over, as it had to end, I felt that kid breathe his last. He is dead and I am here.
I put my computer away and walked outside. Took my car and sped down the road. It felt so good to be here and to be alive. Better than it had in awhile. I cranked some music and hit a curve. The g-force felt good on my bones. I was fresh. I was breathing. I was going too fast down the highway and watching for cops.
I felt good because the kid I was is not the kid I am. I know I've changed in the past two years, I know I've become a different person, and will continue to do so. I know that time is strange enough to accommodate different versions of the same self.
I don't keep pictures. I hold memories, still as funerals in my head, and they sing better than any selfie ever could. At the end of the semester, I see myself and everyone I was. I don't know. It could've been worse.
