10 Year Reunion (1 Year Late)

No one prepares you for the reality of post grad life.

There are no dining halls to feed you, no undergrads to swipe you in, no restaurants within walking distance.

Go to college they say. UVA is a good school they say. But I can’t find a job. I have my Bachelor’s degree, and I’m scrubbing the toilet at Gymboree. 

There’s no one to talk to about this because the friends you saw every day are now four hours away. You never learned to talk on the phone because you didn’t need to. They were just a walk away. 

Eventually you find a job on Craigslist of all places and have a place to live thanks to an old childhood friend, but you eventually grow apart. All your old friends disappear because you’re not the same person anymore. You’re vegan and don’t want kids.

Eventually you go to grad school because your 9-5 isn’t fulfilling and you need to run away from a boy. The word situationship was not alive and well yet. 

At grad school, you don’t open up because you’re surrounded by white girls again and of course make friends with the only other Asian. They see this and exclude you even more. They eventually accept you through the power of morning meeting, but by then it’s too late: they’ve already developed a lifetime bond. 

You graduate and skip the lawn ceremony because you’ve “been there done that” but again it’s so hard to find a job. There is serious racism no one talks about: it feels like only white people get hired by good schools, but the public school system is so bad, they eventually quit too. 

You glaze over your teaching career because it was so traumatic and your 5-month relationship, and eventual dissolution of all your friendships. 

Every month, March still feels sad because the body remembers the score, but eventually it goes away. However, your depression creeps up during holidays when you have more time alone with your thoughts.  

COVID saves you from having to teach in-person for the last 3 months of school. 

You move back home because you’re done with NOVA and pay a year’s worth of mental well-being and no personal space to live with your parents again. 

Eventually, your sister gets into a MFA program, so you follow her, and life finally looks up again, but men continue to haunt you-not in a scary way, although it could be, but in a crush is such a waste of time kind of way-but finally you are free because they move away and leave you alone. 

And buying a house is stressful but you get through it somehow and you meet your first ever bestie you share with your sister. Life is finally stable after five years in one place, but you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop like how in two months your best friend will move away for grad school. 

You look back at your high school yearbooks because your high school employee wants to know what you were like and realize two boys gave you their phone number-all this time, you thought you were undesirable, but you didn’t think anything of it back then because starting a new life at UVA was your only goal. And you did. College was the best four years of your adult life. But it ends, and you have to figure out the rest on your own because no one prepares you for the reality of post grad life.