The Summer of Absolutely Nothing

It's summer - the end of my first year of college. And I am home again, more than a little worse for the wear.

College hadn't gone how I had expected it to go. After two years of the grind to get in, I thought I would find the kind of magic I saw in American high school movies, which I had been denied of in school - late nights, parties, wild adventures with whacky best friends, romance.... everything one is told is supposed to happen in one's teenage years. After two years of watching my classmates grow up and enter this world, I thought it was my turn, now.

I thought my college life would be like a coming-of-age movie. But in reality? It wouldn't make a good story, of any kind - not even a sad one. The only thing I found were shiftless friends, stifling academic pressure and heartbreak.

So now I was home - a little bruised, a little broken. A few dreams in shards around my feet.

Turns out, I needn't have worried. The summer that followed changed my life. The summer of - after a hectic, stressful year - nothing at all. Nothing, and yet - everything.