we'll dance the night away

I've been avoiding this space because how do you reduce the biggest year of your life into words that can even begin to communicate all that you felt and learned and grew when you felt and learned and grew more than you ever have before?

At 3:30 on Tuesday morning, I submitted my very last paper, and how anti-climatic it all was. With the simple click of that 'Send' button, I could no longer wrap myself around an identity I've clung to for the past twenty years. Suddenly at twenty-three, the future was wide open and the possibilities endless. As this realization slowly hit me over the course of the next few days, the euphoria soon hit, too. Nineteen papers and two-hundred-and-fifty-five pages later, I am done.

School may have been my worst enemy this year, but in spite of it all and because of it all and with it, I survived. I navigated a new campus and remembered new faces and new names and I got my heart broken and I began to imagine a new future and I changed my part and I went on strike and I fell in love with Brooklyn and I opened my heart again and I got my heart broken again and I knew these new faces and new names and I cared less and less and drank more and more and I visited a best friend and a country I loved more than I thought I would and I wrote a bit and I fell down and I fell down again and I embraced this new future and I sang and I danced and I grew and I burst and I swung high into the night last night and never felt happier.