liminal spaces

you seem so afraid for a girl so independent

For the first time in a while, you’re sitting on your friend’s couch with no particular thoughts in your mind. There’s the steady hum of the washing machine overlaid with cars zipping past on the street and airplanes roaring overhead, cool air washing over and raising goosebumps on your freshly shaved arms. You remember this same time last June, when you called a college dorm storage service to gather your things and hailed an Uber to the airport and flew home a week early so that you could spend time with your family before your internship. Today, you got up from a sleepover with your friends and teamed up with them to move your things onto their apartment balcony, and now you’re staying over this entire weekend to hang out one last time all together and watch them walk for graduation.

There’s so many ways this weekend could play out, in laughter and tears and hugs and somberness, but you just want to hold inside yourself all of these possibilities because that means they haven’t happened yet and your friends are still here with you. You won’t see your parents until the end of August when your internship ends, and for the first time, you don’t know anyone at your new workplace. That hasn’t happened since second grade, when you walked into your classroom at your brand-new elementary school in a brand-new suburb that you had moved to just the day before, and turned your head to pan over a sea of curious, unfamiliar faces. You had friends going into middle school, friends going into high school, friends and acquaintances going into college, and even friends going into your previous internship.

For a girl who has always fantasized moving to a new city with a fresh start, you envision so many feelings, of hope and excitement and satisfaction for the summer, that coexist simultaneously and haven’t been realized yet. Your high school boyfriend once referenced the idea of superposition, that a physical system can exist in multiple states simultaneously. He joked that your wave function that straddled dating and friendship could finally collapse if you told your parents, that a superpositioned system (dating/friends) would reduce into a single, definitive state (dating) upon observation, and at the time you thought it was extremely funny. But the moment you chatted with your new roommate and unpacked on your side of the apartment room you’re subleasing, you felt your own wave function collapse into the one state you never could have imagined – fear.

You’re sitting again, but with a blanket guarding your bare skin against the chilly air conditioning and with a million thoughts streaking through your mind. You have a doctors’ appointment and back to back to back work meetings and intern outings and your friends are all done all graduated all back home and your parents are getting so old and the world is moving so fast too fast for you to keep up. After this, you’ll probably close your laptop and just go to bed. The air conditioning clicks off and for a second the apartment is completely silent – no washing machine, no cars, no airplanes. Just you, in a cold college apartment, in a city that doesn’t know you yet.

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