Someone’s College Experience has Started and Ended Since I Graduated🙈🙈🙈
The hot, humid sun beats down onto my bare shoulders. My makeup encrusted eyes scan the busy rooftop under my in style at the time sunglasses. The skirt of my dress sticks to my thighs along the soles of my feet to my heels. My ringed fingers grip my overprice cocktail with the sweat of the glass dripping on my painted nails. My friends and I pose for a picture with our drinks. The rooftop is our first stop for our Manhattan night out. We were all excited to relish in the summer night in the city. My heart is beating with excitement because I know I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
This experience hasn’t happened yet, but when I imagine summer in the city, this image pops in my head, and with summer approaching, it’s been popping in my head more often.
In late July 2019, my supervisor and I sprinted after our coworker down the gravel path next to the highway that went through Healy, Alaska. The town of 1,096 people was our home for the summer. A couple hours earlier at 11:45 pm, my coworker and I walked across the highway to the dive bar in Healy called Totem that closed at three am. We had both gotten off work at eleven, and he had asked during our shift if I wanted to get a drink after work. Me being me who never turns down an opportunity to go out said yes. Since it was late July, the sun was actually setting in the part of Alaska we were in so the darkness of the wilderness of the town enclosed us as we approached the dive bar. I was in my wearing-a-t-shirt-when-I-go-out era so I had one of my many Friends t-shirts tucked into black, flowy pants, and my ever-trusting steeds, my Birks. My large, silver hooped earrings banged against my neck as we walked into the bar that was crowded with other rootless, fleetingness, adventure-craving, and maybe a little lost seasonal workers like us. We both weaved ourselves to the bar and for context, Totem was a place where the bartenders weren’t always the nicest at times and roughly told you they were only making two-ingredient drinks on random nights. It is the definition of divey, but tonight, we got lucky and they were making drinks that consisted of more than two ingredients so we both ordered margaritas.
The glass sweated in my hands as we made our way to one of the high stool tables. The tequila danced around the ice that was bashing against the sides of the glass shouting at me to drink it. It couldn’t wait to be a key factor for the night.
When we left the bar around three, we started walking towards the gas station after we all had more than a few margaritas. My supervisor handed me her debit card telling me to get our coworker pretzels, her ice cream, and myself something. I went into the gas station and since it was a small gas station, the selection wasn’t huge. I found the ice cream and picked myself out a Bear claw, but couldn’t find any pretzels. I kept looking, and it started to rain outside so I knew it should hurry up since my friends were sitting outside in the rain waiting for me. I grabbed a bag of Chex Mix because they had pretzels in them, and that was the closest that he was going to get to pretzels in Healy, Alaska at three-thirty am.
I paid for the snacks with my supervisor’s debit card and walked out in the rain to find them sitting on the dirt path near the ditch. I handed my supervisor her ice cream and debit card and my coworker the Chex mix before I sat down on the dirt path and ate my Bear claw hoping it would sober me up.
Eventually, we headed back to the building we were all living in. Most of the seasonal workers lived in a huge dorm building called Healy Homestead. My supervisor lived on the first floor, my coworker on the second, and me on the third. My supervisor and I grabbed our coworker’s arms to put around our shoulders since he was pretty unsteady at this point (we’ve all had those night). His hoodie was covered in mud so the mud from it started to rub on each of our white shirts.
We got to the second floor where my coworker lived, and my supervisor said she was going to take him back to his room. They both hugged me goodnight, but when my coworker hugged me goodbye digging his dirt-stained chin into my white t-shirt that was already covered in mud from helping him walk back to Homestead, but he said, “Love you.”
“Love you too!” I drunkenly shouted. I was trying to sound casual like other attractive guys had said to me before. Even though he wasn’t attracted to girls and wasn’t in love with me, he was still saying the L-word to me. For some reason, it felt too good to ignore and changed the trajectory of the night. Usually back then, I would have been scared away like the scared kitten I could be at times, but this time the L-word ignited a feeling in me that I couldn’t ignore.
I got to my room around four am to pass out with my damp, dirt-covered clothes on and the lights still shining bright. When I woke up exhausted, hungover, and nauseous the next morning, I felt as if my life was changed. The prior night was the first time my coworker and I had hung out for the first time without being in a big group. Our supervisor was with us, but the other nights we had gone out together we were in a group and never really talked.
As much of a mess I was when I woke up, I still felt so alive. I thought to myself that my coworker was one who was making me feel alive. We had such deep talks at the bar, lots of laughs, and I knew there was a connection there. That morning in my hungover state started the messiest friendship of my life.
I moved to Alaska at the beginning of June for the summer and was living there until early fall to work at Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge in Denali National Park and Preserve. It had been a goal of mine to work in Alaska for a time being, and now I was checking the goal off my list. I just graduated college, I was coming off a semester in Europe, and didn’t want to stop my travel dreams anytime soon. I went to Belize for nine days and then moved to Healy, Alaska for the summer.
A town that was populated by 1,096 people which is bigger than my hometown, but similar to other Alaskan towns, the houses were spread out and not clustered together at all.
My coworker and I were both Guest Service Representatives at the lodge. He was twenty-one at the time, and I was twenty-two. I had just set off on a gap year after college. I love traveling and was not ready at all for the real world. Since I had just graduated college a month prior, I had just left the community that I had formed over the past four years, and now here I was entering the murky waters of post-grad. I had just gone through a friendship breakup with someone who I thought would be in my life forever, the post-grad blues were developing, and the loneliness was a pool I was swimming in. To say the least, I was not expecting at all to meet someone who would become of my best friends for a chapter of my life only a month after graduation.
Throughout the first week of our working the same shift together, my coworker was working on freshening up his resume. He knew I had been an English major, and asked me if I could help him. Most nights at the lodge, things would start to slow down around nine pm so we would work on his resume then eventually once we finished, we would look up funny things on the internet, have a heart-to-heart, or joke about the most random of things. We laughed a lot, and working with him made work so much fun. I always assumed we would be work friends or go out in large groups friends. Never anything more. Until the night he asked me if I wanted to get a drink after work which led to us going to Totem and getting way too drunk. It was the beginning of us going out all the time and hanging out almost every day.
At the end of September, I hugged him goodbye before climbing on the bus that would take me to the airport because my Alaskan experience was ending. He was staying for another week in Alaska to help close the lodge for the winter before he was road-tripping to California before moving to Portland, Oregon. I was staying at home in Illinois for a while before visiting Hawaii and then moving to Park City, Utah for the winter. We were both continuing our travel lives.
My Alaskan summer was a bucket list goal checked off, but it was also a summer full of falling in love with a friendship that would dictate my life for the next three years. Despite my blooming messy friendship, it was also a summer of a lot of good.
It turned into me running on the winding road to Otto Lake trying to savage my long-lost love for running, the sun never setting, seeing the Northern lights, my roommate and I venting to each other about the disgusting, communal showers we had to use, eating bread and butter after the 3:30-midnight shift after everyone else had worked the 2:30–11 and were already in bed or out with friends, knocking on my coworker’s door after work and us staying up until three or four in the morning listening to Taylor Swift, walking to the 24-hour gas station, and drinking free white raspberry mochas before work.
It was the summer that took place in the wide, open sky, a mountainous Alaskan town only miles away from Denali National Park and Preserve.
Several months later, I grabbed two bottles of colorful Seagrams from the mini fridge in my studio-sized room that I was living in with two other girls. My twenty-four pack of Seagrams was dwindling with the constant going out I was participating in that winter. It was late afternoon and I was off that day. My friend, Agnes, had just gotten off of work and we were planning on going to the hot tub at our building complex. She lived on the floor below me on the second floor where I lived on the third. I pulled on my sports bra and spandex. I then covered myself with my sweats, hoodie, puffy winter coat, and my snow boots for the two-minute walk to the hot tub. I put bottles of Seagrams under my thick winter coat and walked out the door. Agnes was waiting for me on landing outside the second floor.
We got to the hot tub that had a few people already in it, but it was big enough so it didn’t seem crowded. Agnes pulled out two colorful, flavored beers from under her winter coat and set them on the nearby table. I set my bottles next to hers. Agnes and I started removing our coats, hoodies, sweats, and boots. We decided to drink the Seagrams first then would drink the other two bottles.
Some of the cement squares around the hot tub were heated, but others were normal cement that was icing our bare feet with its freezing exterior. We both dashed to the heated cement squares before we climbed into the hot tub with the scalding water engulfing our cold bodies. We clinked bottles with the colorful liquid inside swirling around, and we sipped as we sat there for hours with the steam dancing around us. The snow started to fall as if we were in a movie or something. People came and went, but we stayed hoping the night would never end.
I was working at Deer Valley Empire Pass as a Guest Service Agent in Park City, Utah. Park City is a bougie mountain town where the Christmas lights stayed out all winter long and the intricate snowflakes never stopped falling from the clear, sunny skies during the winter months. It is of over 7,000 people about forty-five minutes away from Salt Lake City.
I was freshly twenty-three. My Utah life turned into trips to Salt Lake City where the coffee and food were cheaper than PC’s, eating Einstein bagels, walking to the gas station to buy too many Dunkin’s bottled iced coffees, microwavable frozen meals, Agnes and I wandering around Walmart and walking up and down fancy Main Street.
This all consisted during my first-year out of college which was one of my formative years, but it’s been four years since I’ve graduated from college. Many people’s whole college experience has passed since I graduated. It feels eerie, freeing, nostalgic, and strange at the same time. Throughout the past four years, a lot of things have happened. I have felt all over the place, scattered, and trying to figure out my life, but now I finally feel like I have a grip on things. Settled and grounded with certainty. And I have a steady hand on the swinging rope of life. When I first graduated college and was experiencing my first-year postgrad, I was embodying the free-spirit hippie girl I had wanted to be throughout college as these stories display, but now here I am living in New York and loving every minute of it. It’s what I’ve always wanted, and it’s helped me feel so settled and joyful.
Recently, I have been feeling vast amounts of exuberance or excitement and vast amounts of boredom or impatience for upcoming exciting times. I can taste the summer at my fingertips, and my heart beats ready to live the summer to the fullest. Part of me thinks that is why I have been feeling some ounces of boredom because I’m so excited for the summer and reminding myself it’s my first summer in New York. I’m still finding my footing and community here, and there will be plenty of NYC summers to follow this one. I know by next summer I will have found my community because I would have been here a year and half by that point, and I know myself. I know I am good at meeting people and forming connections. Although, I am entirely grateful for the moving around I did in the four years since I graduated college and moved out of Iowa, but it has consisted of a lot of starting over, but now I’m in the place I always wanted to end up. Community is starting to swirl around my feet that will only continue to grow.
A summer of drinking overpriced cocktails on rooftops, coffee dates with friends, walks around the city, nights out, wine nights in, staring out the large windows of work dreaming about when I get to go outside and walk through Central Park, and overall a summer of excitement and adventure is at my fingertips.
And I can’t freaking wait.
