Everyone Else Left in August

Everyone else left in August. That's the part nobody warns you about. Senior year ends and there's the loud bit, the gowns and the photos and the relatives, and it all feels like an ending you're doing together. And then August comes, quietly, and one by one the group chat starts posting photos of dorm rooms — cinder-block walls, twinkle lights, a stranger's half of the room — and you realize the ending wasn't together at all. It was a starting line, and everyone got off it except you, and now you're just standing there in the empty road in your hometown holding the gun. I'm Rowan, and I did not go to college in August. I want to say up front that this was a choice. I keep having to say that, to relatives mostly, in this bright firm voice, because the alternative — the thing their faces assume — is that college was a door that closed on me, and it wasn't. I had an acceptance. I had, technically, two. I just stood in front of the door with my whole life packed in boxes and felt, with a certainty I couldn't argue myself out of, that I did not know why I was walking through it. And it turns out "I don't know why I'm doing this" is a really bad foundation for forty thousand dollars of doing it. So I took a gap year. That's the official term, the one I use with relatives, and it sounds great, doesn't it? A gap year. It sounds like you're in Peru. It sounds like self-discovery with a backpack and a journal. Here is my actual gap year. I have a job at Critchley's Garden & Home, which is a garden center on the highway, where I am responsible for the indoor-plants section and a man named Gus. I have an apartment, if you are generous with the word, which is one room above a dry cleaner, with a tap in the bathroom that drips at a rhythm I have learned to sleep through and a window that looks out at the side of another building so closely you could shake its hand. I have, in the bank, eight hundred dollars and a slowly growing understanding that eight hundred dollars is both a lot of money and absolutely no money at all, depending on the month. That's the gap year. No Peru. Ferns. It's the lying I wasn't ready for. Not big lies — I'm not living a double life — just the small constant maintenance lying you have to do when everyone around you has a plan and you have a fern section. My aunt called last week and asked how I was "using the time," and I heard myself say I was "exploring some options and doing a lot of reading," which is a sentence that means nothing, a sentence built specifically to mean nothing, and she said "good for you, smart to be intentional," and we both hung up having successfully avoided saying the true thing, which is that I spent that particular evening watching a video about how to revive an orchid and then crying a little, not about the orchid. My mom doesn't push. I'll give her that. She just gets this look sometimes, across the dinner table on the Sundays I go home, this careful look, like she's watching a kettle and trying not to be seen watching it. She thinks I'm lost. I know she thinks I'm lost because she told my aunt I was "finding my feet," and "finding my feet" is what you say about someone who has, currently, lost their feet. But here is the thing I haven't told my mom, or my aunt, or the group chat, or honestly even fully told myself until I started writing this down. I don't think I'm lost. I think — and I know how this sounds, coming from a person who repots ferns for slightly more than minimum wage — I think everyone else might just be moving so fast that they can't tell the difference between having a direction and having momentum. They all got on a train in August. Good for them, genuinely. But a train picks the destination for you. That's the deal you make with a train. I didn't get on the train. I'm walking. And walking is slower, and it's lonelier, and it means standing in an empty August road feeling like the last kid picked. But when you walk you can stop. You can stand in the indoor-plants section of a garden center on the highway, on a Tuesday, in the green humid quiet of a hundred living things, and feel something settle in your chest that has not settled in years, and think, with no relatives around to perform for: oh. Maybe this. Maybe I'll figure it out from here. This is the story of my gap year. There's no Peru in it. I should manage your expectations now. But there is a fern that I bring back from the absolute brink, against all odds, in chapter nine, and I'm not going to pretend that wasn't one of the proudest moments of my life.