The state of perpetual transition.

I have four more days of taking the Long Island Rail Road to work. For nearly a year, I have let everybody else complain for me that I have to take that hour-long trip into New York City everyday. I feel so humbled when I look up at that giant popsicle-shaped office building and again when tap my keycard on the little metal gate in the lobby. It still amazes me that that gate lets me in with a friendly “bink!” every single day.

Since securing my new home in Astoria, I have been eagerly looking forward to leaving Long Island behind. I drive my car under the Hofstra University unispan every day thinking, “Why am I still here? The door’s been open for so long, why haven’t I walked through it yet?” And then in the last two weeks, I’ve seen the floodgates open, and the campus completely empty out. It was not under the happiest circumstances. It was like everyone was fleeing, but I had to stay. Just a little while longer.

Since everyone in my house has already moved out, and there would be no more house meetings held via facebook message, I deactivated my facebook account. You always read how social media is linked to  negative self-image and anxiety, and for me it came to a fever pitch after the shooting on my college campus.

I was sick. I cried at work. I woke up the night she was killed with a nightmare. I was listening to music in a dream, and the music turned into a girl screaming. I woke up in a cold sweat with a throbbing pulse in my throat. I felt my mortality when my grandmother passed away suddenly last month, and I felt it again when a girl who lived a block and a half from me got killed in her own home. I didn’t want to know how my peers felt about it, but I found out anyway. 

It was then I realized that my relationship with facebook was a masochistic one. It had to go. I’m about to start a brand new life so indescribably brilliant, it would be an insult to waste my time looking at the poorly-worded thoughts of people I vaguely know. 

The internet is not a place nor is it a state of mind.