The other day I heard myself say the following words aloud: “I feel like my life hasn’t really started yet.”

I might have been walking beneath the gradually changing leaves or driving with my hands clutched tightly on the steering wheel. I might have been staring into space, mind preoccupied with future things, faraway things, abstract things, or I might have been twirling a pencil between my fingers instead of trying to toil through math homework. I might have been riding a unicycle with a dog strapped to my chest like a baby for all I know. The point is, I don’t even remember what I was doing when I speculated on the meaning of my life thus far.

So, I’ve been doing some internal digging.

For seniors in high school like myself, we are at the denouement of a most significant epoch. Things are simmering, dust is settling, and four years of questionable choices and mortifying self discoveries are quickly disappearing in the rearview mirror. We have found grooves in which to perch ourselves and friends who won’t waste our time on petty disputes. We are older, somewhat wiser, and thankfully a few inches taller.

But the next horizon is not far off.

While thriving in our exponentially less awkward 18-year-old lives, a looming, ambiguous shape moves steadily closer. College, it murmurs. Applications, it hisses.

And so begins the troublesome dance between the life we’ve led for nearly two decades and the comfort we’ve finally found in that life, and the life that awaits us, combustible with potential but oozing with risk.

I have chosen a particularly risky and unusual path: applying to colleges abroad. If all goes according to my terrifyingly brilliant plan, I’ll be sipping tea in a cafe in London or Dublin one year from today.

I’m waiting for this thrilling literary adventure with bated breath. I spend more time ogling over pictures of my dream schools in distant countries than I do paying attention to what’s taught at the school I’m still in. I plan for a future not yet set in motion, a life not yet on track to be lived.

I’m thrashing behind a gate that’s locked, fumbling for a key I don’t yet possess, watching the world go by on the other side but neglecting to step back and appreciate the side I’m on.

It is the In-Between Time of a life on the brink of explosion. Neither here nor there. Not ready to cut the ties to bygone days, not certain enough of the future to prepare for it.

Drifting.

All of our accomplishments have been made. Years of classes, extracurriculars, failed tests and triumphed tests, homework and essays– they’re all set in stone now. The past is wholly untouchable, but the future sort of is too. So here we are, in between.

I’m never going to stop striving for a future that shimmers where the light touches it. Maybe that means my thoughts will often wander to quixotic places, faraway places, rolling hills and urban streets and crumbling ruins– those types of places. Maybe it means I’ll feel a little stuck where I am, waiting on a letter in the mail, and maybe I’ll decide to be okay with that.

Or maybe that means I’ll look around every once in a while and like where I am, just for old time’s sake. Just to remind myself that life has most certainly already begun.