Winter Break, you dastardly thing. You make us dream about you and anticipate you for months. From the point Fall semester reaches full swing to the post-Thanksgiving whirlwind that is finals prep, you are on our minds daily, hourly, constantly.
You bring the promise of an extended vacation from school, of celebrating the holidays, of seeing our family and hometown friends, of parties beyond compare and without limits.
But you fall flat, every year. We stay in town only to work constantly and be more lonesome than Elvis Presley and Hank Williams, Sr. combined, with all our friends having abandoned us to go home.
Those of us who have gone home find no peace or joy there, either, though. We find all our hometown friends feeling more trapped than we, working too much to spend time with us, and constant reminders of why we moved out of our parents' houses in the first place.
Our holidays are nice, our feasts are great, and we enjoy sleeping in and staying up and out without a care in the world. But all of this joy is fleeting, as we collectively feel nothing more than slumped, wasteful, and filled with dread, regardless of where we may be staying.
You are the world's most beautiful liar, Winter Break, and you somehow manage to make us forgive you time and again. You are never filled with the bright snowy days we deserve, with the childhood joys of the beauty of winter weather, or with the companionship and Hallmark-movie fires we imagine.
Instead, you are filled with ugly, grey, dreary weather and with sharp drops in our mental well-being.
Even the neurotypical among us feel your wrath, as you rain down upon us with the deprivation of sunlight, of social interaction, of an ounce of comfort, and replace it with early sunsets, dimly lit days, and weather so cold it becomes an excuse for not leaving the house. You suck the joy out of us and you separate us by hundreds and thousands of miles, determined to break our will.
But as we enter the new year, you and I both know your tyranny is ending, Winter Break, and while you will lash out at us even stronger as January helps your season peak in the worst ways, it is merely a week or two before we band together again.
School will start back up, and while we may struggle to adjust to the new classes we will take, we will no longer be facing you. We will be freed from the ice-cold steel fist you rule us with.
We will be surrounded by joy and warmth and love, by our friends, by obligations to keep us too busy to lose ourselves in you, by so many wonderful things that we will forget everything you did to us.
We will celebrate as January fades, as the Western World becomes obsessed with love in February, as it looks forward toward Spring in March, as we come together to celebrate the world around us warming back up, as we anticipate the sweet release and true freedom that summer brings.
We will have our stressors, don't get me wrong, life is never perfect. But we will not have you bearing over us in this way. We will build ourselves up on new experiences, new people, new knowledge.
Some of us will look forward towards ending our college careers and being free from the cycle, others to furthering our education to achieve higher professional positions, and most to just fleshing out the next year of school.
But all of us will have forgotten you and your brutality. We will grow stronger as we share our stories, as we discuss how we survived, as we band together for those who didn't come back, and you will become a thing of the past. Because you see, Winter Break, compared to the collective strength of human companionship, you are nothing but a small hurdle.
We may be suffering now, but you should brace yourself because I can assure you that Spring Is Coming.
