11 a.m. Sunday morning. The sun creeps in just a little.
A pounding headache ensues. The initial thoughts are confusing, and the clothes are the same as last night. The bedroom smells of cheap drinks, and the living room isn’t any better.
The coffee table is patterned with beer bottles, playing cards and an ash tray. The smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke lingers in the air, and two friends are just waking up on their respective couches. Not seeing them there on Sunday wouldn’t be right.
“Food?” one asks the other.
It’s another weekend in Fredonia. Not everyone spends their free time spending money on beer, but we do, and soon that’ll be over.
I’m a local of Chautauqua County, so my departure is imminent. Cabin fever, some might call it. But since my transfer to SUNY Fredonia, I’ve had fun.
Maybe not as much as you, maybe not any less either. Nonetheless, I’ve had fun.
I’m sure there will be bars and things to do wherever I end up, but it won’t be Fredonia.
Those nine bars, those two late night/early morning “restaurants” and all the money wasted (or wisely invested) in a 48-hour period will go unmatched.
As we try to recollect what happened the night before, the weekend is now just a single blur. A blip on our timeline. We then proceed to list our options off for food — unhealthy options, for sure.
“Chinese?” someone announces.
A good idea in the moment, but a regrettable one after the buffet is mixed with the lingering alcohol in our stomachs. We’ve made better decisions, but we’ve made worse ones too, like drinking excessively the previous night.
Graduation is close. Soon we’ll be walking on stage, and then in a short amount of time, we’ll be walking off of it no longer Fredonia students. Weirdly enough, that stage is such a monumental token of our future lives, yet we’re on it for merely a blink of an eye. If anything, everything we’ve done up until that point has been on our actual stage: the stage where we performed the most, right?
But the number of weekends like these are dwindling. As the weather gets warmer, the stress of the so called “real life” we’ve been reminded of for so long slowly seeps in. In some ways, we’ve been getting attuned to this myth the adults spoke of for so long. They mentioned it after high school graduation, but college prolonged our youth, so to speak, at least for awhile. Yeah, we’ve all had jobs and balanced our social life on top of our education, but soon there won’t be as much to balance.
“What time’s your class tomorrow?”
Soon the realization that you didn’t do any homework over the past three days sets in. The rest of the day either consists of a “Snow White” reminiscent nap or a plethora of anxiety while you rush to catch up on anything and everything school related.
In the end, we regret we even drank in the first place. But the next weekend most always mirrors the one before it. And so forth.
Until there aren’t any left.
This might be terrifying to some, but it’s the inevitable. We all have to graduate and move on eventually; well most do. So when that time comes, I hope we all can embrace it and be happy and maybe even a little ashamed of the things we’ve done in Fredonia. While the days are few, they are not gone yet. So I encourage all graduating seniors to just have a couple more of their typical weekends before they run up.
“I quit drinking,” the naive friend says to the group.
No one even listens now because they’ve heard it before. Over and over we pretend we’re tired of this lifestyle, but we’re not. Not yet. But soon, this falsehood of us declaring that we need to change our weekly activity might actually become true. And when that happens I won’t miss those nights that much, but I hope I can remember just a few of them.
Until then, I’ll be seeing you on my routine hangover Sunday.
(Exit stage left.)