College. It’s the mysterious “next step” that gets talked about ad nauseam. It’s the incredibly drawn-out process that takes more energy than nuclear fusion. It takes forever and a week and a half to get through it, and it feels like a black hole sometimes.

At the beginning of sophomore year (yes, sophomore year), college felt like this faraway, intangible thing, despite going to high school on a college campus. As I started going on college tours during the second half of sophomore year, it felt a lot like the beginning stages of planning a trip. At that point, I was still figuring out what I did or didn’t want to do, and what kind of environment I did or didn’t want. College was still a very distant concept. I had no real need to think two and a half years into the future. All I knew was that I wanted a big state school that wasn’t overwhelming and had good school spirit, but not to the detriment of its academics.

Junior year came around and not much changed. I was still two full years removed from college, and I didn’t really feel the need to think about it all that much. The future still felt distant, despite my college list getting significantly truncated and more pointed as I went on tours. Later on in the year, a lot of things changed all at once. I decided I wanted a different path, so I started looking at journalism rather than my original target, civil engineering. Oddly, my list at that point didn’t change at all, except for one addition: Indiana University, which was added primarily for informational purposes. I went and visited last May, and what I saw there, from the park-like campus to the college town, the global studies classes to the fully student-run newspaper, made me quickly decide that that was where I wanted to be. At that point, the jigsaw pieces were starting to come together, and I had a clearer, though still conceptual, vision of a path forward.

Even when I had to write a myriad of essays for several college applications at the beginning of senior year, it felt far away. I still had a whole year of senioritis to slog through before I got to a point where I would actually be going to college. Even once I got my applications back and I committed to IU, college still felt surprisingly abstract, like an arbitrary vision of what a state-school future in Indiana might hold.

I started to realize that college was a certainty when I started filling pre-arrival paperwork, such as housing forms and advising paperwork. Beginning to make practical arrangements for living somewhere is a very concrete step toward living there, and it’s not something I’d ever had to do before when switching schools. It’s always been ‘apply and show up,’ no packing required. But this year is different.

Only when we started making travel arrangements for orientation and move-in did it really get real. It dawned on me then that this was something I was going to do, that I am going to be moving away from the place I’ve lived my entire life and starting anew 23 hours from here by train. For the first time in the whole process, it felt a bit intimidating. As we discussed where we’d stop on the drive out, things felt very real very suddenly. I felt a sense of ambivalence about it, in part awaiting the new chapter, in part wanting to relish the old, despite the plentiful rockiness that featured prominently in the last two or three years. I finally figured out the finality of this year, and how so many things that have meant so much to me over the four years I’ve spent in high school, including the monotonous stability of high school itself, are coming to a rather abrupt end. There is no next year anymore; this is it.

After about two hours of mild wallowing and sulking, I began to accept the reality of the matter. I decided that I may as well take it in stride, since it’s going to happen at this point. It’s not that difficult, in any case; all I have to do is pack up everything I need to live and move 900 miles across the country. Not that bad. As of writing, I have begun planning what to pack and organizing how to pack it, and it seems like my whole existence will be reduced to six gargantuan packing bags, two suitcases, and four oversized items. That’s easy enough to do, since I have three months to assess what I do and don’t need, and I can do a 50/50 split between what I bring to college and what I leave at home, which means much less hassle at the airport. Now that I know internally that I’m going to college, I can start planning what I need to get done before leaving (the list is a marathon) and what I need to bring with me (the list is just as much of a marathon). I, like my classmates, are getting ready for the next step, and now my job is to make sure the logistics are too.