The Part Where I Pretended I Was Fine in the Parking Lot

There was a moment last night, standing in someone's backyard with a red plastic cup and café lights going warm above me, where I looked at Sophie across the folding table and thought: she did it. Like, actually did it. Four years, a degree, the whole thing. And I had to look away because I was nineteen and holding a Sprite and suddenly very aware of the gap between us on the timeline I'm always cataloguing in my head.

I've been thinking about timelines a lot lately. There's a woman in my communications class, I'm not going to use her name, she'd probably recognize herself anyway, who came back to school after fifteen years away. She said it offhand during a partner exercise, the way you'd mention the weather. Fifteen years. And she said it like it wasn't a tragedy, just a fact. A starting point. I've been turning that over since, and last night standing at Sophie's party I turned it over again, holding my Sprite, looking at the string lights.

The honest version of this post exists somewhere in a document on my computer that says 'not for the blog' at the top. I wrote two paragraphs about the parking lot on the drive home, mentally, obviously, I wasn't actually driving and writing, and by the time I got inside I'd already decided I wouldn't publish them. And then I sat down and opened a new tab and here we are. Sophie would think this is hilarious.

Happy graduation, Soph. I'm rooting for you from my spring semester Introduction to Business Communications class, which is going great and is definitely exactly what I thought it would be. (It isn't. More on that later, probably. I always say probably.)