My college experience can be divided into three different phases, each one getting messier and messier as the years rolled along.

The summer before my freshman year I was forced to participate in a 5-week intense college demo. This 5-week boot camp was to prepare me for the next 4 years of college. Since I was an EOP student, or in other words a poor and less qualified student, I was mandated to partake in this 5-week experience to make sure that I would be all caught up and ready to crawl my way to the top amongst all the other normally enrolled students. The EOP summer academy was an interesting experience that in no way prepared me for what was to come but what if there's one good thing that I definitely took away from that wretched experience it's that I was able to meet some really great friends.

As a freshman, I was really shy and to myself most of the time. I was a loner and appreciated the time I had to myself. It took a long time for me to adjust to living alone and having to fend for myself. I was homesick a lot of the time and didn't have that much time to go home since I was working most weekends to be able to afford college. There were, however, a few days when I was able to experience my fair share of buffoonery.

One of the friends I made during the summer was Destiny, I guess you could say that it was destiny that brought us together, I enjoyed her company, I appreciated the long and deep conversations that I was able to have with her an no one else. When we weren't trying to discover the secrets of the universe we would go bike through campus. One day we decided to take the school bikes off campus to the local neighborhood. We are both from the city and hated how suburban and quite Stony Brook was. Something about the long streets and dark corners made out skin crawl. We were scared but still continued to move forward. We heard noises in the bushes and saw small animals running in our peripherals. We couldn't see anything at this point except for the few feet in front of us that was being illuminated by the flickering light of our bikes. There right in front of we suddenly saw a small animal on the road, not moving a single inch. It twitched and we lost it. We were screaming and peddled as if our lives depended on it. Before I knew it we were back at the Dunkin Donuts by campus. We walked in, ordered a couple donuts, sat down and couldn't resist the tears streaming down our cheeks. We were hysterically laughing at 1:30 in the morning in the middle of a Dunkin Donuts.

There were so many other things that happened in the time I've been here but for some reason, I keep coming back to this memory. I was stress-free and authentically living live. What I remember isn't the relationship, or the academic success, not even the bad times can overcome this memory, I wonder if she remembers this the same way that I do.