you live here now

So this is what college looks like.

Bowls of cereal and messy desks and lots and lots of water because there is absolutely no humidity here and I feel dried out. It's a strange feeling. To go from melting like a popsicle just standing outside to needing a jacket as soon as the sun goes down even though it's barely the beginning of September.

As we walked around campus during those few days of freshman orientation, our counselor talked about how we could hang out and study any where. If a classroom was open, we could sit in there. If we liked a grassy area on campus, we could sit on it. One thing he said in particular really stood out to me.

"You live here now."

And that is such a strange thing to realize, that you live at school. That the same place where you sleep and eat is where you listen to lectures and take notes. That the places that you go to have fun and the places that you go to die a slow, miserable, painful death by textbook are one and the same. At any moment in time you could run into someone you know. That fact is so mind boggling to me. That in a sea of several thousand young adults, I can run into my roommate, people from Late Summer Honors, cousins, my cousin's friends, people from Pittsburgh, friends that moved from Georgia years ago, and new friends I've only met once or twice, all in the same day. And they all live here too. And that is something so incredibly odd to me. Not bad, per say. Just odd.

Sincerely, mad