Back to Campus
It’s my senior year of college, and I am still waiting to fall in love.
I am a theatre major, studying scenic design, where I get to build worlds and watch them crumble while sitting in front of the University of Pittsburgh stage of my choice. You would think that my mediocre digital drafting skills would be a total chick-magnet, but I keep getting in my own way.
This year was meant to be a culmination of sorts. I think I was cosmically headed towards something, and now I’m headed towards the couch to watch more X Files so I can finish the season before school starts. Senior year was supposed to mean so much, and I was supposed to be ready to move on to the next chapter having done all that I wanted to do. Like take a girl to a nice restaurant and walk her home afterwards, which seems way bigger than it is.
Yet, no amount of quirky scenic sketches can give me what I really need, which is courage. For example, I’ve liked a girl for almost a year and a half and haven’t told her, because I have the romantic prowess of a main character on The X Files (my quarantine series of choice). If you’re not familiar with the show, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are absolutely in love and wait several years to make a move, which must be where I developed my personal seduction strategy. I’m a slow-burn, long game, friends-to-lovers kind of guy.
Anyway, something about a deadly pandemic makes me want to throw love-related caution to the wind, because my school is having in-person classes and my friends and I could be dead within the year. It seems dumb to wait to say nice things to people when there’s an extremely contagious virus and a super-volcano in Yellowstone Park. There’s probably X Files-esque creatures waiting to harvest our organs for their young. Things have never been less guaranteed, so I decided I would tell this girl how I feel the next time that I see her.
I dropped the hint that she should come and visit me at my new apartment, and she revealed that she’s not returning to campus. I realized that if the pandemic gets worse, like we absolutely know it’s going to, I might never see her again.
I might not see a lot of people again.