Molly Carroll

It’s laundry day. My first day off after a week picking up over time at the hospital, when it’s time to pull my life together. I blindly dig out the last clean pair of socks I have right now from the back of my drawer. Spots of gray paint decorate them in a careless pattern and I’m reminded of how they got there.

We have already hit our one year anniversary of college graduation, the year anniversary of my move to begin my post-grad life and “big girl” job quickly approaching. I can tell because the DC humidity is already rearing its head rather rudely and the pool at my apartment building is nearly ready for the Summer, patiently waiting to see how many more books I can open and close poolside these coming months compared to last year.

But it’s not the weather or a date on the calendar that reminds me of how much has changed in the last two years, but a pair of paint-covered socks I’m forced to wear on laundry day.

June 1st, 2020, Bryn Mawr, PA. I have already successfully moved myself into my off-campus Senior house at Villanova. A one woman show, I was allowed back into our on-campus apartment from Junior year to gather the things we left behind in a hurry when the pandemic hit and campus was shut down, just to move it all five minutes up the street.

My friends that came to Bryn Mawr for a much-needed reunion while I moved in have already come and gone and I am driving aimlessly around town. Alone now, I’m filled with a strange combination of excitement, finally away from quarantine at home and living on my own again, but also a sense of loneliness and hesitation knowing that our senior year would not be the year we hoped for. I was equally as thrilled to reunite with friends and feel some normalcy as I was anxious about my last year of college not living up to expectations. Little did I know, I had the notorious “Summer in Bryn Mawr” ahead of me that would bring me some of my fondest college memories.

The sky an ominous gray-orange color, a drizzle hitting my windshield, I slow to cautiously approach each intersection as I begin to notice the traffic lights near campus are completely black, but am excited to see that the power is still on in my neighborhood. I could spend the afternoon ridding my bedroom of the awful turquoise color it had on its walls.

I somehow manage to move all of my furniture to the middle of my bedroom, lay down a massive tarp, and pop open the beautiful pale gray color I spent nearly a half an hour debating on. The sun is setting, turning the already-dark afternoon into an even darker evening. I’m about seventy five percent done with the project, paint clinging to my hands and messy hair framing my face, when the lights go out and the AC turns off. I giggle to myself when I notice my childhood fear of the dark making itself known again in the form of total stillness. Determined to finish what I started, I find every battery powered light in the house that I can, and instinctively FaceTime my then-boyfriend while I paint in an effort to make time pass faster. It isn’t until I finish the last wall and step back, straining my eyes to evaluate the job I had just done, when I notice that my detail oriented paint job turned a bit more reckless and I had splattered paint on the tarp at my feet, covering my socks with messy gray spots.

That Summer was characterized by friend reunions, 30 person group chats, new temporary jobs that would get us out of our parents’ houses, very few worries, beach trips, long drives, no bars, drunk walks to senior house parties, waterfall swims, long talks, sleepovers, saying “yes, I summer in Bryn Mawr”, falling in love, El Limon take out, therapeutic crying in the car, beer die at block parties (with hot dogs of course), ice cream from Hope’s, and picnics by the Villanova church.

Now May 22, 2022 I am one year into complete adult independence. My new normal consists of a full time job, new friends, rent and bills, scheduling flights home to be a guest in my parents’ house, more time for hobbies, walking everywhere, apartment gyms, a career mindset in place of a school one, exploring new cities, reading so. many. novels., reminiscing on old past love to navigate what new love can look like, FaceTime calls and weekend trips to best friends I once lived with or could walk around the corner to see that are now scattered in different cities, and being floored by a frickin’ pair of painted splattered socks.

The point is, life changes fast. New “normals” sometimes become normal too fast, in my opinion. And nostalgia is a feeling to cling to, not to run away from. So I hang on to the things that remind me of what it was like to live in a different season of life, even if it’s a stupid pair of socks speckled in paint.