Navigating a Familiar City

I'm navigating a familiar city, a city so large that I can walk through pieces of its boroughs with my eyes closed. I feel my future creeping up behind me like death, but I am far from dead and slowly nearing the future. I know bits of the east and west sides, and sprinting through Central Park to my favorite little tree never fails to make me chuckle and laugh. I revisit home – the city that holds my future, yet I am merely a speck of dust on the top of a bookshelf that you've never cleaned in your small New York City apartment. This future approaching in this magnificent city is as undecided as a blank page in a fresh journal; limitless, yet restrained to what you can imagine and encapsulate in your own mind.

The future I speak of is the end of my time at NYU, and my emergence into the "real world," even though it is still two years away. The last pillar of my temple of youth is slowly beginning to crumble. First, it was my childhood friends, as I broke away from the unity in our schooling, skipping a year and successfully graduating early. Second, it was my family whom I abandoned to pursue my dreams in New York. Third, it was everything I thought I knew about life and myself. Fourth, it was the artistic form that my body physically cannot keep up with, and a lifelong dream ripped out from under me: dance. Fifth, the final pillar of my undergraduate academic career, which has enabled me to flourish, learn, and explore concepts and themes that my pre-college self could never have imagined, and to create art (similar to the piece you are reading right now).

Right now, my mind is a mess, and I'm trying not to break down. It's been a rocky road to get where I am now, with my feet firmly planted in a mix of comfort and confidence in myself, yet also frozen in fear of failure. Breathing through the words as they fly onto the page, my worries, triumphs, fears, and everything else are being left for the world to judge. Reminding myself that each step brings me closer to something great, internalizing that soon I'll be a grad.