Letter to My First-Year Self — Kat Samper
An Ode to the Girl I Once Knew:
There are a lot of things I could say to you, the version of myself that existed four years prior. I could probably tell you all about the way your college experience will be turned on its head in the heat of a global health crisis or how much you like olives now, to your great surprise.
I could go on about how long it took to get adjusted to New York City living from having grown up in the sun. The sun coloring each of your fondest memories and how they flash by now that you’re on the cusp of your newest horizon, riddled with spilled sunsets and the occasional hopeful sunrise, peppered with oranges and yellows and blues and pinks and purples.
You’ve memorized these rays of sun and the feeling of fond attachment that exists in any Floridian kid who knows just the way the sun feels on your skin in the morning, in the afternoon, right before dusk. These memories, in hindsight, are brighter now that you look over your shoulder into what once was.
You’re different now, and you hold your attachment not in this particular sun, the same sun which escapes us all every night, but in the familiarity you’ve created around yourself; the wholeness of the new environment you inhabit, the new ways the sun feels on your skin in the morning, in the afternoon, right before dusk, peeking through the looming windows of a nearby skyscraper.
You’ve memorized every curb, when you should step down or step up onto higher ground on a sidewalk, when looking right and left before crossing the road is truly necessary. The period of time until it would be safe for you to trek across Delancey Street, the amount of seconds that will display on the street sign before the red hand begins to flash.
You’ve memorized roughly the number of leather-slick patrons who will be waiting outside the Flower Shop bar on a Thursday night, where to hide your packages to avoid them getting stolen, this happening more often than you’d ideally like. The way you need to kick in your bulging front door with your foot to ensure it remains closed, securing your semblance of safety. The fact that there are seventy-eight steps to reach your sixth-floor apartment, the final floor, just before breathing in the gray air that emits from the rooftop, a broken emergency latch away.
In these ways, your path has become an extension of you, an extension of the person you became over these four years, two-hundred and eight weeks, one-thousand four hundred and sixty days.
What I’d really like to get across to myself, is that you will always memorize the world around you and how you fit into it, transcending the unknown and all that you don’t yet recognize. If you let time and space take its shape with you both as the audience and the protagonist, what once felt foreign and vague will fade and eventually feel like the Floridian sun again. For the sun never really leaves you, it only finds new ways to rest on your skin, glowing with clarity, if you let it in.
