Away from the structure of school

Driving away from anywhere for the last time comes with a bittersweet emotion to it.  Being a passenger comes with an extra level of angst with it since you can watch the building disappear through the car window, visibly exiting your view the same way the place exited the mind as a location necessary for one to keep a mental map of. Your university campus might reappear in your dreams, indeed, throughout the first few months it often would. The reflection of your face in the car window's glass felt like an omen, almost, in your memories of the ride home - your own face a shallow reflection in the glass, as you would be in your own company for a long while now. The landscape through the windows symbolizing the world of nature that would feel like your closest companion that summer, woods by your house you would hike like they were the path between the student library and your dormitory, maybe even more often.

Leaving a university at least came with a diploma, a consolation prize to make up for the way you had since lost the third place for meeting friends, lost a place where you had more of a semblance of independence, living in a dorm room. The dorm advisors were extremely hands off, so even though your parents had funded everything from tuition to the meal plan, you still felt like you had been more of an adult there than you were now, at twenty five years old in the same bedroom you survived high school within. 

The sheer amount of time that had passed meant not a single high school student currently attending the local high school would be one you knew anymore. Children rode their bicycles through the suburban streets as they always did, but they were children new to the neighborhood. Their families had moved in while you were away, residing in the McMansions the small houses like the one your family lived in had been bulldozed to make space for. You felt like you had been bulldozed to make room for new students in the classrooms you once sat inside, gangs of kids on bicycles no longer the same as the ones who chased you growing up. Current middle school kids would fill the city bus you now rode downtown, and you wondered why you had never done that as a preteen, if cell phones had really altered landscapes that drastically.

Having ended the chapter of your life that was university, you had no real clue what was going to occur next in your life. You had hopes, everyone had some hopes for the future, provided they assumed they had any future. Your problem, however, was that you were raised without that assumption. Your parents hadn't expected you to survive your childhood, and while they were thrilled and grateful you had, they also were just as unsure as you were about where your adult trajectory was meant to go post-university. 

Chances were all around you. Chances as in activities you could attend, places to explore, to meet new people, jobs online demanding applications, and yet you felt no desire to take any of them. You longed for the world you had left behind when crossing that graduation ceremony stage, the diploma sitting in the drawer of the desk you once did your high school homework assignments on feeling like a mockery of how far from who you had been you now felt.

 You spent hours online advising unknown high school students to attend the university you had, despite being all too aware your own prospects for your future were tanking the further away in time your existence traveled. After all, you missed university more than you had missed any previous era of your life. Why wouldn't you try to lead others to the world you so desperately desired to return to? Reminiscing about university was as close as you could get to returning to it. Trying to teach younger peoole on their way down the path you already traveled was as close as you could get to returning down the temporal path the way you could the spatial one in the woods you would repeatedly hike just for a reason to leave home.

You sometimes lose yourself in fiction about other universities, fictional college students and relationships filling the void left by your lack of responses from your own real life university friends - only your bestie had stayed in regular contact, and the majority of communication between you two has been exchanging pictures of your respective pets. Not exactly deep meaningful conversations like the ones you would have on campus, in part because you no longer talk as much with actual voices, as phone calls are not a task your generation is particularly adept with.

 So you would lose yourself in fictional friendships and sometimes even romances, feeling somewhat lacking due to the fact you had four and a half years of university and yet had not fallen in love once. Then again, not having been in love meant you didn't have your heart broken either.  You wrote about characters with broken hearts, coughing up flower petals as they struggled to admit they were loving someone who would never love them back.

You always somewhat assumed life post-graduation would feel more like an accomplishment. After all, you were raised to believe a university degree was your ticket to employment. Only that tale had been a lie. Your university degree was just a ticket to no longer attending university, to being back in your parents' house because you never learned how to find a place to live while at university, instead acting in the very unusual manner of having spent the entire time in the dorms.

Your life after school was just barely able to be considered a life. You did art, you read all the books on your To Be Read list, you tried making online friends, and of course you applied for jobs. You wrote fiction, pretending you had lives you once had, with classes and friends and... was living in fiction really healthy? Probably not, but it was healthier than merely consuming fiction. Writing at least meant you created something, even if that something couldn't be monetized. At least you continued exercising your mind by reading, even if your body was less often exercised. You made an effort to leave the house every day, usually trying to go on some kind of walk.