I’m standing in a parking lot in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It’s my eighteenth birthday, which is quite fitting because it’s also the day I’ll be moving into college, four states and four hundred miles away from the place I’ve called home my entire life. Eighteen. I’m an adult now, legally, maybe not so much mentally, because my parents unloaded my life into a small, stuffy dorm room, kissed my cheek, wished me a happy birthday, and drove off 400 miles back to where we started. Where for seventeen years I was groomed and cut and poked and prodded and soothed and hurt and healed and hurt again into the girl, sorry, woman that I am supposed to be right now. The woman who is eighteen years old, who couldn’t wait to leave her small, stuffy hometown for a small, stuffy dorm room at a school whose location is uncomfortably close to the West Virginia border but hey, the party scene is unbeatable and the football team is division one and the entire vast universe of frat parties in hot, mildewy basements is at her fingertips. The woman who couldn’t wait to drink until she couldn’t see straight, file herself into a cabinet of all the other crop-topped red-lipped dirty-sneakered women who all hungrily taste their drinks like it’s their last meal, being stirred into a cauldron of rampant school spirit, purple and gold, seeing black and tasting red, hunched over a toilet in the library and wishing she could swallow a paperweight to keep the acid from making its way back up, covered in foreign fingerprints like a dollar bill, doctoring slushies with poison and stealing bricks from the quad, this is what she wanted. This is what I wanted, The College Experience, they say. College, the figurehead of America and its strange, unnatural course of maturation that it paves for seventeen-year-old souls, no rights or autonomy, with only dreams to cling to. College, a cemetery, where these dreams find room to breathe or die gasping for air, where I laid my dreams to rest because you can’t be a writer, no, everyone wants to be a writer but who really makes it in a dying industry? Because you know Borders closed down and that’s just a telltale symbol of how books are becoming obsolete and nobody wants to read what you have to say anyway, you’re an adult and you need to know what aspect of your being is marketable enough to make a living for yourself and you need to pay for this degree and you know that everything you do from here on out represents who you are, but really what do you know? You’re eighteen for god’s sake. A woman, barely. A girl, clinging to the cusp of womanhood, dipping her toe in the idea and then immediately jumping back because its ice cold and the waves are torrential. You can’t be a writer in a big city where buildings and dreams alike stretch up towards the sky like monoliths, you swallow that reality like a dry pill. I gulp it down, feel it scratching against the walls of my throat, willing itself to come back up but I’m eighteen and I’m a woman and I learned how to swallow paperweights to keep this at bay. I’m standing in a parking lot in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It’s my eighteenth birthday, which is quite fitting because I’ve never felt smaller. I lose an inch with every step I take. Four states and four hundred miles and one step, two steps, three steps away from everything I’ve ever known, idly strolling into four more years of blissful oblivion, of grooming, cutting, poking, prodding, soothing, hurting, healing, hurting, into less and less of who I am supposed to be.