I Cry Over Milk That Has Yet to be Spilled

My first mistake was buying the planner.

It was bright pink, and obscenely cheery and compact, and it had space in it for 1.5 years. It seemed perfect. It wasn't until today that I realized I'd made a terrible error.

See, I was flipping through the pages to write in my graduation date - which by the way, is in three weeks. And suddenly I realized: after graduation, there are 12 more months for me to fill in this little planner (assuming I don't lose it, which the odds are against). There will come a time a year from now when I'll be able to flip through to the beginning, and I'll notice the little notes I made "DZ Cubs Game" and "Brings Props and Costumes for Castle" and "Hindi midterm 3" and "Dillo Day Shindig" and I'll have to accept that an era in my life actually ended, somewhere between pages 60 and page 63.

This may sound melodramatic, and it is, but it reminds me of this heroine I read about in sixth grade, who wrote letters to herself. Every year on her birthday she wrote herself a letter, and she opened the letter she'd written the year before. I tried this, but before the first year was up I'd forgotten where it was, and I found it by accident years later, and it was about halfway through (where I wrote "let's be honest, M-- is the only guy in our sixth grade class whom I'd even consider dating" that I was so horrified I burned it)

Anyway, that experiment failed, and thank God, because what an exercise in misery. I hate looking back because to me, nostalgia is more terrifying than heights. I realize, of course, that life is not in fact a vast funnel narrowing inexorably into Death, but I'd still rather not contemplate the infinite.

Because what frightened me earlier is not that one day I'll look back and realize what time has gone by, but that today, here and now, I have no idea what lies ahead. The thought of the entire universe that goes by in a year is so frightening. I've always been unnecessarily frightened by this, and for years after something ends I spend far too much time feeling belatedly bereft, just to avoid feeling presently confused.

This is a bad strategy. So now I'm of two minds: either destroy the damn planner and get a new one when my new life starts, or keep it as a test of my character. After all, there might come a day when the phrase "Hindi midterm 3" makes me want to cringe just as badly as my sixth grade flames do now. Or when I don't really care at all.