Last night we had dinner at Debbie’s house. Nick, Debbie, Brienne, Mark, and myself. She moved in not too long ago, and her place looks just fantastic — curtains, a full set of furniture, pictures hanging on the walls, kitchen stocked with utensils and hardware…she’s even got a massage chair. We cooked. Some kind of pasta casserole, and crescent rolls. Brienne brought fresh-baked brownies for dessert. We ate, we laughed, we talked about work. As we cleaned up, Nick laughed and said “Does this mean we’re adults? The fact that we’re starting to invite each other over for dinner?” It was a good question.
Since graduating, most days I am tempted to give school only one more year of my life. Get this master’s degree, and then find something permanent. Something that would allow me to get an apartment, or a house, and come home to its comfortable walls day after day. Make new friends, and real friends. Friends that I know I won’t have to leave unless I make the conscious choice to do so. It’s not that the friends I will always have in Atlanta aren’t real; they are my life, and have made me who I am. Instead, it’s just that I don’t want to go through the extraordinary pain of saying goodbye to them or people like them ever again. I long for the stability of normal, post-college life. Yet every muscle is straining to get back to school.
“We’re not adults. We’re just not in college anymore,” I said as Nick dropped me off back at home at the end of the evening.
No big differences these days, just the same old walkaways…
