Just Kids
On living, collecting, and the Patti Smith of it all
There are years you live through and years you collect.
I’m nearing the end of my second year of college and feeling existential about the fact I won’t be back here next year and maybe more existential that once I am back, it’ll be for the last time. Everyone always tells you that college moves far too quickly and I’ve always thought that didn’t apply to me. And yet!
Anyway—I’m trying to be more intentional with collecting these years as I live them. This little collection of vignettes was something I worked on last summer. I think I had some intention of it going somewhere different than where it went, but it’s not summer anymore (further, it’s almost summer again) and I think I’ve been sitting on it too long to be productive.
So here it is! My freshman year, as I remembered it when I wrote it. Not in its entirety, of course. Most of it is probably true. Some of it might not be.
This year was one of the collecting ones.
I didn’t realize that at the time—not really. At the time, I was just going. I was too busy calling people who didn’t pick up, skipping breakfast, telling myself I’d respond to that email tomorrow. Running across campus without an umbrella. Eating animal crackers and pickles for dinner. Staying up too late for no reason I could explain, or for reasons that made perfect sense at the time (that I usually regretted the next morning). I just thought I was living—or trying my best attempt at doing so.
It felt like chaos—not necessarily accumulation. But things stuck.
And later—afterward—now—it started coming back in pieces. A sentence someone said once. A smell in a grocery store. The chords of a song played through someone else’s earbuds. I’ll be walking alone, or listening to a song, or trying to fall asleep and it will just hit me. The memory of a morning. Or a hallway. Or the sound of someone’s shoes on the stairs. Or the way someone looked at me before they laughed.
That’s the thing about a year like this—you don’t realize what you’re building until it’s already happened. You look back, and it’s all there. Not clearly, and definitely not neatly. We were tired. And we were trying. That much I remember.
We went to class, usually. We skipped readings and stayed up all night writing essays we should’ve started three days earlier—and then did well enough on them to give us zero motivation to change our methods. There were deadlines we barely met. There were breakdowns we didn’t explain. Sometimes we drank too much. Sometimes we slept too little. Sometimes we went home early. Sometimes we didn’t go home at all. Sometimes we didn’t go out at all, just sat on the floor and let the night pass around us.
I don’t know how to describe it except to say that everything felt kind of heightened and also kind of stupid. Maybe that’s just freshmen year, in general, for everyone. I don’t know. I only know the year I lived.
We were just trying to get through it, largely—school, the city, being eighteen, nineteen, all of it.
Everything felt like it might mean something. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. Usually I couldn’t tell the difference until it was over. Even now, I’m not entirely sure.
There were long nights that got louder the later they got. Pizza at 4 in the morning. Melon popsicles in the middle of January. Gas station flowers bought out of guilt or celebration or both. There were people I saw every day and never really got to know—not fully, not enough. There’s always next year. There were moments I wanted to tell someone something and couldn’t (or wouldn’t), and so I didn’t, and so it stayed. There’s always next year.
We meant things we didn’t say. We said things we didn’t mean. We had secrets and we had patterns and we had whole emotional biographies we only shared after two in the morning. There were things we hoped people noticed. Things we prayed they didn’t. We were carrying a lot—homesickness, guilt, crushes, disappointments, textbooks, our backpacks.
But there was joy, too. A lot of it. There were the dumb little moments. In group chats and shared playlists and the places we always ended up without planning to. In staying too long. In walking back slow. In having somewhere to go.
There was something almost kind about the way we were existing. Unfinished, a little fragile, but mainly trying to be good to each other.
Trying to be known, even just a little, even just by ourselves.
Sometimes I think it wasn’t all that special. That I remember it with rose-colored glasses because it was mine. But then I remember how certain days looked. How laughter sounded echoing up the stairwell from three stories below you. How the air felt right before the first snow. How it was to walk home with people you didn’t want to say goodnight to.
That’s the kind of thing I want to remember. Not the plot points, but the pulse of it.
This isn’t quite a story. Not yet, at least. It’s a season of our lives. A time.
A version of all of us, just before we became more ourselves.
Still figuring it out. Still unfinished.
Still just kids.
9:38 PM - Maine, May 2025
I submitted my final essay at 9:38 PM on a Monday.
It was dark outside. I still had all the shades up in my room, though. If I looked up, I would’ve seen the moon reflecting a path across the water and the stars starting to fill the sky.
I didn’t look up.
I was in Maine, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a blanket over my knees and my laptop heating the tops of my thighs. I read over it twice, adjusted the title, and hit “submit.”
The page refreshed, a submission email was sent to my inbox, and I closed the tab.
That was the end of my freshman year.
The essay was for my English seminar: A Very Good Girl: Virtue, Love, and the Cost of Being Chosen in Mansfield Park. I had turned in worse work. I’d also submitted much better work. I’d cared more—other times. But I liked that one well enough. I liked Fanny more than I had expected to—and the ending of the novel still bothered me.
I texted my mom, and Natalie. Stared at the laptop screen a few seconds longer, like something else was supposed to happen. Nothing did.
I thought it would feel bigger, somehow. Or at least cleaner. More like an ending and less like logging off. Instead I sat there blinking at the empty screen, like something was else was supposed to happen. Nothing did.
That night, I remembered the first one. The beginning of it all.
I hadn’t thought about it in months.
August 22nd. The Bronx. Move-in day.
I was one of the first to arrive. My parents moved me in, we went to Pugsley’s for the first time, walked around campus, stopped by the bookstore, then they left. I don’t think I cried. I think maybe my mom did.
There was only one other girl on my floor—Lily. We talked for awhile in Bishop’s Lounge, both of us vaguely pretending we weren’t trying to listen for other voices in the hallway. There weren’t any. The lounge was full of heavy leather chairs and couches and a piano only I had touched yet. There was no air conditioning—just the loud, incessant buzzing of three box fans blowing in different directions and the windows open to let the heat out.
Afterward, I went back to my room and unpacked the boxes of food I had brought. Granola bars and apple sauce and electrolytes and all the things meant to keep me healthy if I decided the dining hall food was truly terrible (it wasn’t that bad). I organized everything in my rolling cart next to my dresser. I was really just trying to stay busy.
The room itself was fine. My roommate wasn’t there yet, so one half of it still looked like a prison cell—but a kinda nice one, at least. Bare walls, tiled ceilings, air conditioning hum filling the space. I felt lucky I was one of the four freshmen dorms with air conditioning. The overhead light was too bright, so I turned on the lamp on my nightstand instead. It was too dim. I turned the big light on again and then off again.
I showered. My first time in a communal bathroom. Brushed my teeth extra slowly, just to kill time. No one else came in.
I remember I shut the blinds that night. The church was right outside and the lights from across the courtyard seemed so bright. I don’t know why I wanted it to be dark—it wasn’t like I was planning on sleeping in. I guess the street light outside my window back in Ohio was never bright enough to cast shadows on my wall. It was different and so it was strange and so I wanted to fix it.
I went to bed around ten, I think. Set my alarm for 7:15. I was supposed to meet on Eddie’s at 8 a.m. for breakfast. I lay there for awhile. Switching between apps, songs, thoughts. I read the letters my parents had written me for Kairos. I tried not to check the time too often.
I don’t remember what I felt, really. Not really sadness, not really excitement—just a kind of dull awareness. Like everything around me was humming and I hadn’t yet joined in.
It wasn’t cinematic, but it wasn’t lonely, either. It just was. My first night. The start of the year.
Back in Maine, I opened a blank document. Not for class. Just to write something—anything that didn’t end with a Works Cited.
I didn’t know where to begin. The house was quiet. I heard the water lapping against the rock wall and the distant sound of loons calling to each other. The light from the hallway slipped under my door. A moth kept knocking against the windowpane.
I just sat like that for a long time. Laptop warm on my legs. Cursor blinking. Nothing urgent for once.
I shut the screen eventually. I reached for the Patti Smith book sitting on my nightstand and started reading.
I didn’t want to forget it all.
Maybe I already have, partly.
But here it is anyway.
Flowers, Flowers, Flowers
I kept flowers in my dorm room as much as possible. Not because I bought them—I never did. They just kept showing up.
The first time was in September. It was the season of weddings at the chapel right outside my building. There was one almost every weekend—I’d look out my window and see the bride getting ready to walk in the church. I enjoyed the romance of it all.
This particular Saturday, they threw out all of the floral arrangements afterwards. The trash bins in the courtyard were overflowing with pink and white petals. I went down with Emma to get some. Pink and white roses, hydrangeas, baby’s breath. Beautiful, beautiful flowers.
We took the best ones—brought them upstairs, spent at least fifteen minutes in the bathroom cleaning up the stems and making arrangements. We used whatever we could find—water bottles, jars, more water bottles. I put them everywhere in my room: a vase on my nightstand, one on my desk, one on the windowsill. That night my room smelled like a florist shop. I think it was the first time it felt like mine.
Later that semester, Fran brought me flowers from the gas station, or a street vendor, or one of the cafes right off campus. The details are a little blurry, so please excuse me for that. I had told her once that I loved the idea of being given flowers, and that no one really had done so before. This was after the wedding haul, of course—but dumpster diving roses didn’t quite have the energy I was looking for. I wanted to be given them on purpose.
I had just gotten rejected from the Model UN team. A valid decision—I had literally no experience and while I am fine at public speaking, improvisation of public speaking has never been my strong suit. At the time, though, I was devastated. I hated the fact that I had tried something new and then not been good at it. I suppose that is the danger of having consistently done the same activities leading up to that point. I digress. Point is, I was very upset.
And then Fran and Emma showed up at my door—with a coffee and a bouquet of flowers. And so more water bottles were emptied out and repurposed as vases and thus my collection grew.
Then December came, and I got a package notification from the mail room. Having not ordered anything, and with my mother being evasive when I asked if she knew what it was, I was suspicious from the beginning. I went to pick it up and the whole mail room got excited when they realized who I was. Turns out, I had been sent a bouquet of flowers.
It didn’t have a name on it, and the student workers all seemed to be under the impression that I had a secret admirer. Alas, it was just my secret Santa—but it was nice to pretend for a moment. And Lydia (the not-so-secret secret Santa, at that point) has always known me well enough to know how much I’d enjoy the surprise.
I got more on my birthday. First sent by my dad—yellow and white, in a smiley face vase—delivered to me by a lady parked in the middle of Fordham Road. The second was from Beattie and Natalie, delivered later that afternoon. Pink lilies and baby’s breath, in a Little Women vase.
I never threw the flowers out right away. Even when they wilted, I let them stay. I liked watching how they changed—the way the petals curled in and fell. Sometimes they dried beautifully. Other times they just collapsed. Some (the baby’s breath from the Little Women batch) are still with me, months later.
There’s something I love about being given something that will never last. Something unnecessary. Not practical. Not expected. Not asked for.
Just—here. I thought of you. Aren’t these pretty? They won’t last, but aren’t they pretty while they do? Right now? Here—I thought of you.
And this year, people did. Not always in big ways. But enough to keep my room filled.
Charley the Cat
There’s a cat named Charley who lives in a store on Arthur Avenue. Cerini Coffee and Gifts. He was one of my best friends this year.
I don’t know if he belongs to the owner, or if he just showed up one day and never left. But he was there every time I went. He’s two years old. Grey. A little scruffy.
Most people don’t notice him right away. The store is crowded—ceiling-high shelves, stacks of espresso cups, bags upon bags of imported candy, a whole wall of dried pasta. It smells like coffee beans and cardboard. There are barrels of beans by the door and an espresso machine in the window.
It’s not the kind of place you go in unless you already know what you’re there for. It’s definitely not the kind of place you linger in for long. Well—unless you’re there for Charley.
He blends in. He sleeps on top of folded dish towels or wedges himself between paper napkins and giant tins of olive oil. One time I found him perched on a stack of china plates like he owned the place. Which, to be fair, he might.
He’s sometimes hard to find unless you know how to look. Once you do, he’s always there.
If I crouch or sit on the floor, he comes over. Jumps in my lap like it’s the obvious place to be. I’ve never considered how odd it must look—a girl and her backpack and a cat in her lap on the floor in the middle of the store—but no one ever says anything. Maybe they’re used to it. Or maybe they just understand.
I’ve brought people to meet him—Ara, Beattie, Chris—but mostly it’s just me and Charley. Sometimes I go in pretending I need something. Coffee. A snack. A reason to leave campus. But I never buy anything. I just walk past the barrels, wind through the shelves, and sit. No one working there ever asks what I’m doing. I think they’ve decided I’m harmless.
The first time I went, there was another cat—Dolce. She was gray and skinny, with that stiff kind of movement old cats have. I found her sitting in a saucer, near the counter. When I crouched down to say hi, she started purring immediately. Then drooling. The owner told me she was eighteen. “She’s the sweet one,” he said.
I haven’t seen her since. I don’t think she’s still alive. But I still go. I see Charley.
One time the owner told me that Charley likes me. He said it plainly, but not like it was small talk—just something somewhat worth noting. I said “Oh?” and he nodded. “He doesn’t always,” he said. “But with you, yes.” I was flattered.
Charley is sweet, too. He doesn’t perform. Doesn’t ask anything of me. I mean—of course not. He’s a cat. But still! That’s part of why I go. He doesn’t care if I’m having a bad day. Or if I’m stressed. Or if I’m spiraling about something stupid. He just climbs into my lap and stays long enough for me to feel a little steadier.
When I leave, he follows me to the door. And I make promises to be back soon. I don’t know if he understands—or if he cares—but I do it anyway.
I’ll go back soon enough. I told him I would.
The Guest Book
I took a Polaroid with everyone who came into my room.
That was the rule—not a strict one, but one I followed. I kept my camera and film stocked mostly for that purpose. It got used for other things, sure, but that was what it was for. If you made it to my room, you got a photo. You signed it. I put it on the door.
Sometimes it was the first time I met people. Ryan was like that—he came over with a couple of my friends in Queens Court. Our picture is the most awkward—standing side by side, half-smiling, thumbs up. He’s a good friend, now. You wouldn’t know that from looking at the door.
Other times I had known someone for months, been friends for them for months, but there hadn’t been an occasion for them to come to my room yet. Atacus. Finn. Hypothetically the door is chronological. The people I met first, was friends with first, are at the beginning. And it goes in order—but then you have outliers like those two and the whole order is messed up. Not that anyone else would know that.
In some, I’m hugging people. In others, we’re just standing side by side. Noah and I are back to back in his, arms crossed. Most are simpler than that—shoulders touching, arms around one another, leaning in, smiling.
Everyone wrote their name. Or something close to it—some were close to illegible, particularly those who wanted to sign it in cursive. One guy just wrote his initials. He handed the sharpie to me and said, “Your turn.” I told him that’s not how it worked. My ‘half’ is still blank.
The photos circled the mirror on my closet door. By the end of the year, it was nearly full.
There are people up there I haven’t spoken to in months. Some I might not speak to again. But they were there once. In my room. Posing for the camera, taking the photo, signing the bottom in Sharpie. That was enough to earn a place.
I liked the ritual of it—the acknowledgement. You came here. You were here. I want to remember it.
Industry Access
The first concert was Wasia Project. I wasn’t even supposed to go at first. Ara got herself and one other put on the guest list but Ariana had a lab and so I got to go. It was a Monday night at Irving Plaza. I had just started listening to their music a week before.
The thing about being on the guest list is that you don’t actually have a ticket until you go to the box office and say “I’m on the guest list.” Which, for Ara, was perfectly normal. I was freaking out about it internally (probably externally, too). We weren’t sure what line to stand in or where to go inside, but we made it to the box office, got our tickets, got our VIP stickers, and got waved upstairs.
We climbed the narrow staircase, passed all of the security in the balcony, and got directed into a booth up there. It was just us and the band’s photographer and a security guy manning the door of the green room. We didn’t say all that much—played twenty questions, I think. I was mainly trying to pretend like I was actually supposed to be there. Like this was at all normal. It felt anything but.
Halfway through the opener, a couple more people came. Sat down in the chairs right next to us. Ara leaned over and whispered, “That’s Grent Perez.” I didn’t know who that was. She was now the one freaking out, and I was still mostly just trying to look like I belonged there.
The second concert was months later. Same venue. Same procedure—box office, industry sticker, VIP booth. We were only really there for the opener this time—Sombr—and we didn’t even care that much about him. Neither of us had any clue who the main artist was. Neither of us, now, have any idea why we went at all.
At some point during Sombr’s set I started talking—maybe flirting?—with the guy standing behind me. He was tall, had a nice smile, looked a little older than me. Also was wearing an industry sticker.
There was this adorable little girl standing right in front of us—and she was just enamored with the guy I was talking to.
I pointed to her and said, “I think you’ve got yourself a fan.” He looked at me and smiled. “Yeah? You think so?”
I went back to watching the stage. He went back to watching me.
He disappeared when the set was over. I figured he was someone’s manager or something. Then, a couple songs into the headliner, Ara leaned over and asked, “Was the guy you were talking to the drummer?”
I blinked. “Oh. Yeah.”
We laughed harder than it really warranted. We left a song later. We’d already seen what we came for.
There was Role Model, too. My favorite.
It was Spring Weekend. Natalie slept over in my dorm the night before because we wanted to line up early. We stopped over at her dorm to grab clothes and an air mattress and shampoo—because, at the time, it seemed to make her sense for her to shower in Queens Court.
The RA at the desk was clearly less than pleased about Spring Weekend protocols. We got stopped for perfunctory bag checks and somehow made it passed the guard without having to sign Natalie in.
In an effort to not wake up my roommate, we inflated the air mattress in the communal bathroom on my floor, holding it up between us so it wouldn’t touch the floor. Halfway through, Fran walked in, took one look, and went, “I knew I was going to walk in on you doing some shit tonight,” then just started brushing her teeth.
Having successfully gotten Natalie’s bed set up, we braved the showers. Same communal bathroom—two stalls apart. Thirty seconds in, Nat goes, “AJ, do you have warm water over there?”
I had forgotten the water heater was broken at the moment. That happened sometimes. I burst out laughing. She was less amused. It was probably good for the immune system or something.
Natalie came out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth and found me standing in the hallway, in my satin nightgown and slippers, eating my leftover penne vodka from dinner. Then it was her turn to burst out laughing. We did make it to bed eventually.
We got to McShane by 5:45 a.m. and sat on the floor until noon. Got barricade. Natalie got a Laundry Day pick. I got Role Model’s set list. It was a highlight of my semester.
And then I crashed. Four-hour nap, dead asleep. A 2 a.m. bedtime and 5 a.m. wakeup will do that to you. I woke up when we were meant to be meeting to head to dinner, but I rallied. We went to Estrella’s, split a margarita pitcher, and planned to go out after. By the time the check came, we were already half asleep at the table. I think Beattie made it out anyway. I barely made it back to my bed.
It’s funny how that’s what sticks. The dumb stuff. The Industry Access sticker on my jeans. The little girl with headphones. The bathroom tile. The sleep we didn’t get. The sleep we did.
Some things are like that. You’re there. It’s good. And then you’re not there. And then it’s still good. And then it’s just a story.
It was a good year, all told. I probably romanticized it more than it deserved.
I think moving to New York necessitates that, though.
I think eighteen does, too.
I really enjoyed this one
Where are you off to next year?