The Typewritten Press

Pulled up to the line. Progress blocked by that miniscule red orb we all decided to follow. The car to my left caught my eye. The car of someone that used to mean something. But it wasn’t that car, though the driver could have been her. It looked like her. Or at least from what I could see that wasn’t burning and overexposed from the setting sun. And it really was a setting sun. Those black and white stripes on her long sleeve shirt brought me somewhere else entirely, but I’m not quite sure where. I liked it there.

I kept looking over to try and see her face, to get rid of these associations that small fragments of this person I didn’t know kept bringing up. But we played the “I’m not looking at you game.” Continually dodging glances.

The crosswalk indicator to my right counted down from thirty. Each second I lost was an opportunity to write a new memory. But I never saw her face.

The light turned green and I laid into the accelerator taking the turn at full speed. She’d chase behind. Try to pull beside me. We’d lock eyes for a moment before she sped away for me to never see her again.

But she hardly seemed interested in my fantasy game. I completed the turn, she just pulled away from the line. I was fifty yards down the road, she was a glinting dot in my rearview mirror.

Walking to the library in the dim light cast from frosted globes, I thought about this college experience of mine. Going to school. Completing assignments. Learning. Receiving grades. I thought about my desire to be somewhere else. To get out of here. To be working doing what I actually want to be doing, not waiting in a university system.

But then I thought about what I’m actually doing in this second to last semester of mine, and what other students here are doing, their weighty textbooks labeled with words of Macro Organic Biology, and Global Financial Relations, and Planetary Geophysics.

My actual classwork this semester consists of:

Class 1. Working in a team developing a video game design document

Class 2. Working with a partner creating experimental short films

Class 3. Working with a team promoting a feature film at a nationally recognized film festival

Class 4. Writing a feature film screenplay

I guess school isn’t that bad at all.

I’m going to miss this.

It happens quick.

Second chances don’t come often. Take them when they do and don’t think about it.