MARASCO: End times

You’re a little kid, running around the neighborhood, making idols of the older ones who you see doing these amazing, earth-shattering things — driving, eating ice cream whenever they want. One after another they drift away. What happened to Ben? And Matt? And Lisa? “They went to college,” mom tells you.

College. When you’re in elementary school it’s the end of the horizon. It’s where earth meets sky. You often fantasize about it. “We’re going to go to the same college someday,” I would often inform my childhood best friend when I was seven. He’d agree, “Of course we are.” Which one we would choose to enroll at was the only issue left to resolve.

But we never seemed to be capable of thinking past the faraway dream of college.

Fast forward to high school. You’re bombarded with the idea of college from the moment you walk in the door. Your grades, the sports you play, your conduct, your hobbies, whether you prefer ketchup or mustard  — it all matters. Everything revolves around this idea of getting into college. Still, you never seem to think beyond it.

Then you get there, and you begin to understand what all the fuss is about. Freshman year is an explosion of new people, new surroundings, and new ideas  — all slightly blurred by your new best friends, 4 a.m. binge drinking and joints rolled in $1 cigar wrappers.

A new feeling emerges. You’re no longer looking ahead to anything. You’ve arrived. There’s so much to do, so much to experience and explore, so much to learn. You’re not thinking about where you’re going. Why bother? You can think about that another day. You’re too busy trying to remember where you put that Papa John’s, “half-off any medium pizza” coupon.

Now a senior, I woke up a couple days ago and couldn’t believe the date. It’s spring? The furthest edges of my childhood fantasies are rapidly approaching. My time at the end of the rainbow is all coming to and end in a little over a month.

Perhaps May didn’t feel so close because even in late March, Boston seems to get ravaged by malignant waves of ice and despair every other day. No, the more likely reason is denial. In the same way that we put off work until we’re in a coffee-induced frenzy eight minutes before the deadline, I had put off thinking about life after graduation.

It’s scary at first. I’m the 1400s sailor who’s nearing the end of the map and isn’t sure whether his boat will scoot off the edge and plummet into a black hole. But the closer I get to the limits of my childhood imagination, the more clearly I can see that the world does not end at the horizon.

There’s nothing to be afraid of.  I stand on the precipice of conquering college, my once-distant fantasy. This time only feels so strange because I never thought this far. So, in a little over a month, I’ll plunge into a new world of opportunities that are so vast, I couldn’t even imagine them as a seven-year-old. That sounds pretty darn exciting to me.

Frank Marasco is a senior in the College of Communication. He can be reached at fcm820@bu.edu.