The future

My friend and I went to a university fair last Wednesday,

She came back with an armful of brochures

And a mindful of dreams.

A plan for a future she would never know of

Until she got there.

We talked to admission officers,

Professionals in blazers and patent leather shoes,

Entry requirements rolling off of their tongues,

Boasting about how their schools stood out from the rest.

We read each brochure cover to cover,

Leafing through a prospectus to tell us how we’d live,

Dorms we’d make our homes,

Parties we’d firework through-

The kind of people we would turn out to be.

                   

With that, we lost the kind of people that we were

Right in that very moment,

Shuffling through high school hallways,

Back and forth,

Drowning in assignment after assignment,

Exam after exam,

Sinking deeper into shadows of a lurking future,

One that we couldn’t control.

Maybe it was this lack of control we feared,

Longed to discover,

Giving up every moment in an attempt to understand the next-

Obsessed with the mystery of tomorrow.

Our future lingered in the fine print of that university brochure-

The one part we failed to study:

You will be fine, it read.