xlvi

“With their hands they shall support you, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”

-Psalms 91:12

            This morning, with those damned proverbial butterflies in my stomach, I finally remembered why I am going to college: to get an education.

            It’s funny, though, this past week I had completely forgotten all about the textbooks and pens and staplers that I had haphazardly stored underneath my loft, I had completely forgotten the (supposedly) sole reason that I am here in this still-too-narrow bed, waiting for my phone’s Lonely Island ringtone to go off at exactly 8:03 AM.

            It’s the first day of classes today but I am not nervous like the four-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the seventeen-year-old I once was. I am calm, riding down paved streets of campus on the slowly-malfunctioning bike that used to be my father’s with steady exhales, treading my way past the brick-covered buildings that I will no doubt be very familiar with in four years. But for now, they are foreign and imposing, frowning on my morning wheel-sprint across their lawn, lifting the roots of their sixty-five-year-old steps to trip me on my first day.

            Am I nervous? Maybe a little bit. But I will not stumble.