close

We’re (my roommates and I) at a specific time of youth - a time I’ll call “close.” We aren’t fully adults but we’re close, we’re not completely out and independent, but we’re close. And once again, we’ve got choices to make. I read this paragraph to the room. Lisa gasped and exclaimed “Not choices?!” “More choices?” Anna groaned. “I’ll have a bacon-cheeseburger with large-fries,” Sophy said, adding, “and a blueberry-triple-malt shake.” “Freedom is choices,” Leong, our favorite communist, ungrammatically observed. We’re in the last part of our junior year - which is still hard to believe. We’ll be seniors soon, and seniors have one foot out the door - they’re ‘over the hump’ academically - nothing will be thrown at them that they can’t casually handle, so they sleep-in or trek off to job interviews half the time or in my case, med-school hunting. I’ve written about our lives - the stresses, healthy doses of narrative-suffused teen drama, the ascetic beauties and the enchantments of freedom - trying to capture a few real-life moments at irregular intervals, in small ellipses, to tack them, like butterflies on cork. What’s been hard to capture are the subtler shifts in taste and mood as we’ve aged. I’ve had to purposefully slow down, doppler shift from frantic student to observant writer, to even try and grasp the constantly evolving, small variations. Like Anna’s cainogenetic expressiveness, Leong's imponderable politics, Sophy’s evolving, coquettish bar-side poses and the growing assertiveness of Lisa’s gaze. As we mentally prepare for our real lives, there are diffuse metamorphic changes afoot. What will we leave behind and what will we keep in order to “grow up?” I don’t mean changes in haircuts, clothes and make-up - although I’m sure I’ll MCU-those-out - I mean the psychological changes. Throughout our college careers, the objects we’ve surrounded ourselves with, the settings we’ve chosen to inhabit, the faces we’ve shown the world, and even our intimate notions of ourselves have changed. And It’s still only junior year, I can’t wait to see what comes next. . . slang, and notes... *cainogenetic: adaptations in development that aren’t found in evolutionary ancestors MCU-out = the nauseating oversaturation of something, like the Marvel-movie-verse. Adults don’t always grasp (remember?) the thousands of small but concrete choices governing the life of, say, a middle-school adolescent. The zig-zags that appear puzzling or random from afar, stem from questions like, ‘What does my belt say about my sexuality or my relationship to oppressed people in poverty?”