may meant the beginning of the end.
for everyone else, may meant summer. may meant school was almost over and that everyone’s long-anticipated plans to go on vacations or do absolutely nothing were all on the horizon.
for me, it meant that i was only three months away from changing everything. may was the precursor to a summer full of counseling summer camps, and summer was a precursor to msa.
i wanted the days to fly by, bringing me closer and closer to school before i’d even realized how much time had already passed. i wanted everything to go faster and faster and faster until the calendars turned to august and it was time to make a new home.
may was full of new. may meant it was time to start pulling my roots and planting them into a new pot. it meant cutting away all the weeds that the suburbs had wound around my stem in hopes of keeping me in its stagnant clutches and suffocating me.
i may have been the kudzu, but suburbia wasn’t going to keep its grips on me.
so i uprooted myself. i packed up any sentiments i may have held towards any parts of hernando and tucked them under my bed. my old bed. the bed that has all of my yearbooks since kindergarten under it. the bed that has my old baby blanket and books i haven’t touched but can’t bring myself to get rid of under it.
i wasn’t putting anything old under my new bed. new beds meant sleeping in new places, and new places meant new things to hold sentiment to.
i was getting ready to start all over again.
for me, the month of may has always meant new. it’s always meant change or rebirth or some other thing that leaves some part of you feeling new. it’s a feeling i can’t really describe, but i know you know what that feeling is. maybe you felt it on your last day of school before coming here. maybe you felt it on your last day of summer before moving in. maybe you felt it late one night this summer when you finally realized that everything was about to change.
we all started over. actually, it’s more like i started over, and how i viewed everyone else started over with me.
they didn’t really change much, but i did.
i am.
