Two students from a lesser known college stood, waiting by the side of a road at a crossing in Lancaster. From a distance they looked small, and a closer look would’ve confirmed that they were in fact both short. Recognizing the assemblage of traffic, the girl shifted on her feet and glanced at the boy. She had always been a bit risk-averse, and usually defaulted to suggestions from more sure footed voices. The boy stood wordless, backpack slung over shoulder, tracing the cars with his gaze. There was nothing much else going on that day, so here they were.

They were friends attending the same college, a small school that none of their relatives had even heard of. Hidden in a quiet town and protected for miles by a moat of egregiously planned suburban infrastructure, the school was mostly unknown outside of the Northeast. With sophomore year coming to an end, the two faced the impending sprawl of their summers blowing at them from the congested road. Though it was finals week, the boy thought only about the demands of his present location, ignoring the multitude of papers he’d finished, but hadn’t turned in. Pushing the nagging thoughts about deadlines from his mind, he tried to focus on this liminal period he’d created for himself, which meant finding a way across the road.

At the next gap in the traffic, the boy gave a nod, and together they rushed through the wide asphalt lanes face first into a jet of hot air. Afflicted briefly with sensory blindness, the two coughed and laughed and gave each other high-fives, bending over on that glistening sidewalk. 

The girl had been excited when the boy told her his idea. A walk, he had suggested, to catch up on everything. All of their friends had gone home already, leaving just them two, the only ones left on campus as far as she was concerned. It’d been a while since she last talked to him, as lately everyone had been busy dealing with their own issues, finals and papers included. The boy said he knew a spot in the woods not too far from school with a pond; he would go there to smoke sometimes. 

It seemed like flowers were blooming everywhere on campus. Aster, witch hazel, hydrangea, magnolia. The ones outside the girl’s building fluttered whenever she passed on the way to her room, wavering under the rustling massive trees that obstructed her fourth story window. She liked to be amongst them, sitting on one of the benches outside as she thought, sometimes about the boy, wondering if anything else might have the chance of blossoming that spring. 

The sun bore down on them from directly overhead. There were no pedestrians out, just cars, and trucks. The emissions all around seemed to contribute to a sweltering heat that evoked August rather than May, offset on occasion by the wafting winds carrying bits of gravel with it, and more fumes. Most of the stores were either dead, or part of a corporate chain, and the sidewalks were nonexistent or crumbling to pieces. Paper trash littered the ground like an incoherent trail. They continued on their way.

The girl was indifferent to deadlines, and work. She could knock out a paper worth a half of her grade in hours, with no interest in revision or a peer opinion. At worst they were a nuisance, another task to complete within a major she had little interest in. She looked forward to the day when she wouldn’t have to do tedious work anymore, but figured it wasn’t coming up anytime soon. Oh well. The girl was cool with the passing grades she usually got, and loved being at school, but couldn’t help wondering if something was missing from her reality. At home she had never been made to feel particularly smart, somehow living in the shadow of her younger brother, who consistently blew their parents away with his intelligence and thirst for knowledge. But it all would’ve been fine with her, if only she had something to claim as her own. Something she could be justified investing precious time into, which would through its own fruits, vindicate her to her parents. And what if they had pushed her, when she was younger, to be more? The girl knew what mattered in the end was that she really did enjoy life at her lesser known college, spent with all her friends, but what if she was wrong, and there could be more to it? For years the hypothetical dangled in her mind, being traced all the way back to a seed. What was missing, what she needed, what if it was just that: external belief?

But it was the season of reaping now, and watching the people around her filling out into hardened trunks of trees; it seemed like everyone had planted something, and that now the time for doing it all had passed, and it was too late to still be staring at the dirt with her shovel in hand, too late to not know what one wanted. This feeling of dread she was very familiar with, even as time had slowly cauterized it into the stump of a more manageable detachment. Still, sometimes, when she was bored in the back of lectures, she would toy with the idea of her something, wondering whether she’d find it anytime soon.

Their surroundings changed, as they made it past the busier part of town into a rural neighborhood free from traffic and corporate branding. Clusters of stores and strip malls became sweeping fields of grass flanked by dense pine forests. They stepped off the road here, ducking under scraggly trees lining the cracked pavement, the girl following closely behind the boy across the field into the woods. The wind had stealthily calmed down, and the late spring foliage rested at a standstill. 

They had mostly been talking about their friends, remembering things that had happened that year, funny anecdotes they hadn’t thought about in a while. Conversations centered around what they both knew. The boy identified several points of interest as they walked: a small wooden bridge elevated over a stream, a trash fort covered with a plastic tarp, scattered railroad tracks that had been torn up decades ago. They shared their summer plans too: the boy had an internship lined up, the girl was going to stay with her grandparents on their farm in Central Florida. 

I can’t wait to go, she said, her eyes inextinguishable. I’m going to be taking care of the cows. 

The boy nodded along, but felt sad for her. Why couldn’t people stay in the moment? Why not just enjoy what was presently real? The future wasn’t going anywhere, it would always have to be converted into the present first. What was the point in anticipating what was already inescapable? 

He was reminded of the road trips he used to take with his father, before the second divorce, noticing mile markers from the passenger seat, how each one indicated a single fixed moment that would pass and never return. In the car, time seemed to become abundant, and expendable, something to be gotten through because it was transient; it wasn’t the real thing yet.

He asked her how she felt about being halfway through college already.

It’s really flown by, she agreed. Literally in the blink of an eye.

Yeah, he said. And doesn’t that scare you? 

What the boy saw was the end of this chapter. Since youth he had been in the habit of sectioning his life’s chronology into beginnings and ends, chapters that had special themes and importance to him. The end was coming, and when it came it wouldn’t feel any more real than it did right now, in fact the end already was occurring, had occurred, to some version of himself probably.

I mean I guess, she said, frowning. We still have two years, why are you stressing out about that now?

~

The sun was starting to set when they reached the pond. Golden light speckled the water’s surface, illuminating the corner of the boy’s eye as his gaze swept past its banks, straight through the foliage into a far out distance. 

I just think, he said, planting his foot on a rock, it’s important to try to live in the moment. That’s all we can hope for, all we’ll ever have.

Mmhmm, the girl said, inspecting a trail of ants sidestepping the shoreline, but she was over it, and even as she spoke her thoughts wandered, gliding over the pond’s surface and the heights of the trees moving south towards warmth, subtropical humidity, mangrove forests and the bright bougainvillea shrubs impinging on white sands, soaring over the pastures of her grandparents’ farm to greet their herd of Highland cattle, those sweet, fluffy things.