“We wasted so many summers here…”

“And I still remember, all the hours wasting away together, under the burning sun and those countless humid nights”

1. Rumination

Even as the memories from those days slip away slowly, I still remember the first time I saw those sun drenched buildings and what I felt. They stood tall against the sea from my position on the boat, pillars of cement and glass transposed against a deep blue canvas. They had come into view slowly over the horizon as we drew closer to the island. Some, I would find out, were places of learning, others for administrative purposes and others still for living. I would come to vividly remember slacking off in every single one of them in the coming years. Before any of the numerous midnight or midday runnings and the years of turbulence though, I stood where I was in that moment. The drunken and haughty confidence of youth was still roiling through me at that time, not even close to its coming zenith. Even standing on the deck of a ship heading towards an island I had never once stepped foot in, in an area of the country I knew nothing about, I still had the air of somebody who thought they knew all the wisdom there was to be gained and knew all that needed to be known. Knowing what I know now in this moment, hard-fought wisdom gained through hours of silent self-reflection and years of experiences, I recognize that the person in that moment was acutely unaware of the outside world and the things that truly rested ahead of them.

In the nights to come, years from then, I would wrestle with my own foolishness in those moments, and yet I understand exactly why I thought as I did. I had been something to be admired but pitied in the city where I came from, a genius in my studies and yet a delinquent in the hours outside of school, and from those labels rose a hubris and defensiveness. I was thought of like the roughness around the edges of an uncut gemstone, only needing the right hands to mold me into greatness. They had blamed my woes on my upbringing, a cyclone of bad parents, of bad friends, and even worse role models.

If there is one thing that both the me that was present in that moment, leaning against the rail of the ship and looking hostilely ahead, and the me sitting here reminiscing could agree upon though, it was that all of the people who had sat there celebrating my achievements and bemoaning my faults, were simply wrong. My friends, each a delinquent of their own right, had had little to no effect on my decisions. My parents, as absent and careless as they were, had provided for me the minimal necessary means for me to advance far beyond what I had. My role models, although not as glorious and gaudy as the greats, had been inspiring in their own right, each a monolith to me, representative of their own struggles to survive. The only thing I could blame in those moments, if I was to cast any blame at all for how I would end up on that island in the middle of nowhere, was myself.

I hadn’t cared for much outside of my own concerns and interests, least of all the prospects in the future. So, I had dedicated myself as much as necessary to my academics, doing just enough to give myself leeway in other aspects of my young life. I had spent my true efforts in areas I desired. I had been to more parties and clubs than I could have counted by the time I reached young adulthood, the sounds and bright lights and lightly dressed people had slowly blended together into a cacophony of fond experiences while I look back at them now. When I grew bored of the confines of my own local environment, I began venturing to cities more daunting than mine to explore all the worlds of irresponsibility and lasciviousness I could find. To me, before I truly understood their respective meanings, love and lust had become nothing more than synonyms, used interchangeably to describe the previous night to my friends over a morning drink meant to quell the hangover hard gained from the previous days. There were few days at that point in my life where I was without a slight buzz or at the bare minimum a drink and a cigarette. Really, from the time I first went through puberty to even my own graduation, I doubted there were many truly sober moments I could remember. Yet, I still performed on par with my peers, an effortless master in every sense of the title. Books given with a lecture on how they were an absolute necessity to pass classes sat forlorn and covered in dust every year, only being used at best as a coaster for the drinks I always readily had nearby. Yet the classes were passed with an almost mechanized minimization of effort, I had made it a point to never do more than the absolute bare minimum requirements.

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My lifestyle continued unabated, years passed and I grew slowly into the trappings of the man I would yet become, and by my last year, the consequences of this lifestyle were slowly, and unknowingly, catching up to me. I remember the encounter that changed everything in bits and pieces now, a regular meeting with the advisor assigned to me by my high school, in the middle of my senior year, in a stuffy office with no windows and the only decorations being pictures of the advisor’s family sat upon an inexpensive office desk. He was a stocky man, with a face hard lined by life and disappointment, every bit of happiness and youthfulness replaced with a faux look of seriousness to hide the boredom and discontent he truly felt about his life, or so my young self had surmised. He had looked at me with the slightest amount of disapproval in his dull brown eyes, clearly once again unimpressed by my scruffy and rough appearance. He had spoken in that gentle, yet disappointed, voice I had come to despise over the years. That voice, as scratchy and unrefined as it was, was meant to equal parts soften and hammer in his coming words. “Your grades, average, your national test scores, average, your ranking, average.” Each one was meant to be a declaration of damnation, of being bound into the oblivion of averageness, yet to me, it meant nothing. For a minute, he had sat there and attempted to let those words sink into me, as if for even a second I had cared about any of them, before he continued on, “At this rate, you’ll graduate easy enough, but college is barely in the picture with your grades, and with your behavioral issues… Well, maybe not going to college would be best.” At this statement, I had raised an eyebrow, half in questioning, half in mocking and I had retorted, with some hint of aggression in my vain and still youthful voice, “Well, what if I want to go? Are you going to stop my applications?” He had given me a critical look then, to admonish my tone as much as the challenge my question presented and responded, “The best you can do, as things stand, is attend either a community college or go to one of the lower ranking universities, past that, there's not a chance of them accepting you, and with your rap sheet, even some of the lower ranked ones won’t take a second look.” He had spoken this with a finality that had left me stunned, all my cleverness useless against the reality of the situation at hand. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have free choice of where ever I wanted to go, even now I had been eyeing the same university my friends had already been accepted to, a place sitting comfortably in the upper half of the country’s universities. While they had accompanied me on several of my expeditions, what they lacked in sense they had applied into their academics, fighting much harder than I ever did and ultimately ending up within the top quarter of our class, thus leaving me behind. The queasiness I had felt in that moment redoubled with every single second as I sat in that room, what had once been stuffy had now become sweltering. I tried, with my best efforts, to keep the despair from my face, to not give an inch of satisfaction to the man sitting across from me. All I could do was watch the pity form on his face as he watched me, already condemning me in his head to a lost cause, a wasted potential. I had hated that look and him even more so in that moment. I spoke, after what felt like an eternity but what must have been only a few moments, in a much rougher voice than the one I had used previously, trying desperately to replace the uneasiness with that same aggression I had drawn from earlier, “Whatever, I’ll just go to one of the lower ranking universities, at the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper I'll get after four years, what are my options?”

And so, after a rather morbid graduation ceremony and a summer uncharacteristically spent alone, I had ended up on a boat, heading to a remote university near the bottom of the national registries under a burning sun. To say I felt the place I was heading towards below me was an understatement, to my own opinion, it wasn’t even in the same plane of existence as me. I told myself repeatedly, I would transfer after I had aced my classes the first semester, I would be out of here in record time and go to where my talents could truly be utilized. These were the thoughts that kept rebounding through my head as we drew closer and closer. I hadn’t bothered to take stock of the people around me, instead resigning myself to feel the sea breeze and to weather the heat as I held loosely onto my luggage. The only person I had bothered even giving a second glance was the captain driving the boat forward, a grizzled old man in sailor clothes with a white beard that put my own lightly growing stubble to shame. He had been announcing the time it would take us to reach the island in increments in a burly voice, and even now I can hear the low hum of conversation slowly but surely stopping as we neared our destination. Eventually, the only sound was the captain’s deep baritone voice signaling lower and lower times, until eventually, with a light rocking and a thud, he cheerily announced we had arrived. As I stood staring at the white beaches receding into the dense jungle foliage laid before me, only broken by a small path to the still far away buildings, I can still remember the cold and alien thrill that had swept through me. An anomaly in this summer-laden environment, but one that would come to define my life as I knew it.