peter-versus-mr.-darling

I took the GRE today. I did okay on it.
When I say "okay" I mean I got way higher than I anticipated on the math and not quite as high as I wanted on the verbal.
Because it's a computer-based test the results were available as soon as I finished so I called home while I was waiting for mayhem to find the bizarrely located test center to pick me up and we (my mother and I) fell to talking about my summer's plans, and it hit me in a solid and peculiar way:
"summer plans"
will not have much meaning in my life for much longer. We even talked about my getting a job and an apartment and things. And as abstract concepts those things do not bother me at all even remotely.
But applied to me, on the phone with my mom, they are foreign and frightening and I do not feel like childhood should be over yet. And it is.

Soon my life will not be defined by my double major, or my number of Facebook friends, or the grades I get. Grades. Tiny convenient measures of worth: how many times have I looked at you and felt so good about Me?

I am not sure how my life will be defined.
I know how it should be defined
and even how I want it to be defined.

So really? I will graduate college in seven months. I will either go home for the summer or work and rack up cash and find an apartment and a roommate and get a driver's license and maybe a haircut or something
and my life will go on
because I am alive
and that is what happens to people: they live.

I just have to get used to that living looking very different from what I've been accustomed.
I am
a little
afraid.
That I can't do it without someone else there picking up the pieces of my mistakes.
That the lives of the people I love will also go on but
without me in them
without theirs in mine
and I am a selfish beastie. I want to keep them all. I can't.

(this is only part of it. since I know there are wonderful truer-than-true answers for all of these. but...I needed to write them out at least a little anyway.)