When senior year started and all my classmates were applying to college, I suddenly asked myself: Am I really ready to begin this journey that will take up the next four years of my life, or am I just doing this because it’s the path everyone expected me to take? When I started to unpack this heavy question, I realized there were a few experiences I still wanted under my belt before I begin college. And before long, I had decided to take a gap year to live in a lair beneath this opera house. Here’s why:
I’m not ready for dorm life.
I’ll be honest: I know I have a little growing up to do before I’m ready to live in a dorm, and I think a cavernous lair across an underground lake only accessible by gondola is the perfect place to do it. In what dorm can I aggressively play my organ at all hours of the night, burn literally hundreds of candles all the time, and scream heart-wrenchingly about being an angel in hell? Maybe Bard, actually, but I’d rather not take any chances.
Getting my love of drama out of my system.
If I’m going to bring my best self to a new school, I need to get my well-documented love of drama out of my system. Whether I’m terrorizing the lead soprano of the Opera Populaire, constantly declaring war on people, crashing a costume party for like three minutes but still wearing an elaborate ensemble it clearly took me months to make, or sending everyone bitchy little notes all the time, I know this sort of behavior won’t fly in college. Really it won’t fly anywhere but I am most certainly going to do it. A ton.
Time to refine my social skills.
Some people really like when you scream at them to sing for you in a pretty intense and implicitly sexual manner, but others perhaps don’t? I think it will be important for me to explore this line before I’m in the college-dating scene. Capes are still hot, right? Just kidding, I know they are. It’s actually pretty clear I would clean up at any liberal arts school, but whatever, this gap year is for me.
Fear can turn to love. You’ll learn to see, to find the man behind the monster, this repulsive carcass who seems a beast but secretly dreams of beauty.
This is just a good thing for everyone to remember.
So I hope everyone has fun diving directly into four more years of homework, but I’ll be taking the time to grow and explore in a very different environment: a lair filled with yearning, sheet music, maximalist gothic décor, and a freaky little monkey. ‘Til then, GO NOW AND LEAVE ME. Hags!
