During freshman year orientation, some upperclassman tells you to walk ten steps backward underneath a gigantic bird statue they call Sun God. “It’ll give you good luck,” they say, and for some odd reason, you don’t question it. It is so stupid and you do it, anyways, grinning ear to ear, as if you’re being inducted into some cult of cool, and your parents take about twenty photos of your ridiculous bird pose. “Whatever,” you think. This is college. You’re all sitting criss-cross in a big circle and pulling blades of grass by their roots and ogling at each other. The girl next to you is talking about the bad weather in her hometown and the tall guy across from you is kinda cute so you try to send subliminal messaging through discreet eye contact and you think. Yes. This is college. There is some kind of small magic here and you feel yourself start to melt into it, even if it is all staged and manufactured and trained by student leadership clubs. This is college.
So you walk backward under the bird statue, recite a shitty improvised prayer in your head and officially buy into the whole bird thing. You look for the girl whose name starts with an M so you can exchange phone numbers and make plans to grab lunch that (spoiler alert) will never really happen.
And it’s all great, for a while. College: one big sleepover, one big step into adulthood. Every moment at the market will feel special, every late-night walk back to your dorm will feel special, and every skipped class will feel special.
But unknowingly, as you cross under Sun God, you step out of a version of yourself that you will never meet again. You won’t notice because you’re too busy selling your soul to the Surf Club or Design Club or Culinary Club or any club that promises to make you feel like a real person with real interests and real passions. You’ll throw yourself into a $15 Uber and drink drinks that don’t taste good and fully convince yourself, under Sun God’s watchful eye, that frat parties really are magical. After all, this is college.
Four years later, you did it all. You went to all the parties and said all the right things. You became the very TA that you hated sophomore year. You made some friends you thought would last a lifetime, and then that lifetime came and went. Four years later, you’re homesick for another version of yourself that you can’t quite place anymore. Four years later, you start to feel like you’re doing it all wrong. You want to ask an upperclassman for advice—how the fuck does someone get some good luck around here—but Sun God is under construction and you are the upperclassman and you never ended up texting the girl whose name starts with a G. Or was it M?
You wonder if the girl from freshman orientation or the tour guide or even Sun God ever heard your prayers all along. Or perhaps you were too busy selling your soul to see that Sun God was an art exhibit and nothing more.
So you sit in the dirt for a while and look around for that semblance of small magic and instead notice the tour guides and the moms and dads and their nervous college-aged children, looking up at Sun God and hearing the same good luck speech. And you can’t help but listen, too. Your soul is buried somewhere underneath this Sun God dirt and you’re hopeful that this tour guide can tell you where, exactly. Maybe this time, they can tell you which clubs to join and which friends to make and which good luck speeches to believe in and maybe even how to do it all right.
