3 pm on a Tuesday:

            I looked at my watch. 3 pm. An hour early, of course, I seemed to perpetually early. I sat on the plush grey chair looking at the adults around me. No one else was sitting in the chairs. Awkward.  I checked my backpack for the fifth time: mint blue binder, check, grey polka dot pencil bag with colorful pens, pencils and post-it notes, check, homework planner, check, all five of the books required for the class, check. Dorky blue target backpack, unfortunately check.

            I was sixteen and it was my first day of college. Well, community college. Well, community college through my high school.

            I was sitting in the first college library I’d ever been in wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. I wasn’t ready for this. I couldn’t handle actually college classes. I couldn’t even handle advanced chemistry. Holy shit could I still drop out of classes? Take high school instead. That would be easier, boring, but easy. I wasn’t an overachiever. I was a slacker, a procrastinator.

            But that would be so awkward to drop out, return my books, tell people I had chickened out.

            I was stuck.

            3:15 pm. Forty five minutes early.

            I grabbed my iPod and ear buds and planner from my backpack to make it look like I was doing something. Other people were doing things. Did they already have homework on the first day in college? I thought it was always just syllabi and name games.

            Wow they people looked old. Not just eighteen old but like I have two kids and a wife old. Look at that guy he’s got to be sixty. His pants go up to his chest. Why are you here? Retire. I’m going to be the only one under the age of thirty. I can’t relate to these people, I have no life experience; I haven’t even been off the continent. They’re going to think I’m stupid, young, native. Calm down.

            3:25 pm. Only ten minutes? That felt like an hour. Holy shit I’m sweating and its freezing in here.

            I got up, packed up my stuff, mentally said a goodbye to the weird old library people. Maybe all college libraries had old people in them. I don’t know.

            Posters and artwork lined my walkway.  Notes and Messages from the previous year still up reminding me once again how much I did not belong. This wasn’t my world and who was I to try and force myself into it. Just because maybe I didn’t fit in, in high school didn’t mean I should be able to choose my own new world, that’s not how it works. Why did I think it was?

            3:40 pm. Twenty minutes.

            I was not on the third floor searching for classroom 3119. Of course I knew where it was because I had printed out a map weeks ago in preparation. Still the school year snuck up on me and all of a sudden I was in a school again.

            3116, 3117, 3118, 3119.

            3:45 pm. Still early. Perpetually early.