Four years was not enough

Like Hilary, the happiest time in my life, hands down without any question, was college.

And I don't mean that in a vague sense, like, Hey, what's not to like? I mean that almost every single day of my college career made me so happy and giddy and out-of-my-mind enthusiastic, the only thing I ever worried about was what would happen when it ultimately came to an end.

From the very first day, college just clicked for me. What's funny is that I had never visited it before applying or even accepting admission. I just had in my head that I knew I would like it, and from the minute our rented van pulled into the loading area of my freshman dorm, I knew in my heart that I already did.

I could name for you a thousand things that I loved about it, but the majority of them would come back to one thing: boys. There were just so many there to choose from, to flirt with, to flex for at the gym or banter with at the bars. I never wanted a boyfriend; rather, I wanted to see how many fraternity formals I could get asked to in a semester. Senior year, I did allow myelf to focus on only two guys, but even then, I never lost sight of my peripheral vision.

It wasn't ALL about the boys, of course. I met the best friends of my life at college. That, ten years later, are still the most important people in the world to me. I also liked the work. While I was always a decent student in high school, for every English class that I aced, there would be a math class I was near failing. But in college, it turned out that once I was able to choose my curriculum, I actually enjoyed lectures, learned from my studies, and did pretty well academically, which greatly boosted my motivation and intellectual self esteem.

There were times when my face hurt from smiling so much. When I thought I must be getting wrinkles because I hadn't stopped beaming in days. As the semesters and years wore on, I started to worry - this had to end sometime, right? The happiness, I mean. Surely I didn't deserve to be this happy for this long? Anyway, college and fraternity boys and bars and best friends had to get old at some point, right?

But no, not really. In fact, looking back, I feel pretty safe in saying that each new day was better than the one before it.

I knew that, at some point, the fun ultimately had to end. But damned if I let that happen a second too soon.

After graduation, I had the lease on my apartment for another two months. I stayed up in Syracuse in part so that I wouldn't have to make any grown-up decisions, but also because I knew that I had to let myself get sick of it. I needed to see the campus behind the curtain, so I could believe that, without the technicolor magic of its students, the city was little more than a dull gray soundstage.

That strategy worked, and by the time I moved to New York on that July 4th weekend, I was actually almost ready to do so. But it was a hard fall. After a near-constant, four-year high, the following year felt strung out like a never-ending case of the Terrible Tuesdays. I was young and poor and naive in a city that I moved to on a whim. Suddenly a small fish in a very large pond, I found myself forever swimming upstream.

I deserved it, I thought. No one was meant to be so happy for four years straight, and it was time to pay my karmic dues. I spent that first year and a half after college alternating between feeling low and feeling lower, and worried that, having used up what must be a lifetime allotment of happiness, the next 18 years were meant to be spent teetering on the edge of depression.

And until I moved to LA, I think I kind of did. After my "Freshman" year in New York, things got better, much better. I grew to not only love the city, but feel like a big fish again. But it wasn't until I moved here that I started to find myself feeling the way I did 10 years ago - that giddy, happy-for-no-particular-reason feeling that makes me sing along with the radio and smile at people on the street and just, with every deep breath, feel remarkably satisfied.

I thought all that had been gone forever, that New York had either changed me permanently or Syracuse had been some sort of magical gift I was never meant to recapture. But, as it turns out, maybe that part of my disposition has been there all along, sleeping off its college hangover, just waiting to come back to life.