Moving To Silence

One. Before The First Kiss

Spring- Northern Arizona Community College- Freshman Year

Maia Clover

Hidden amongst piles of work, homework and study materials, college was continuously portrayed to me as the doorway into the rest of my life, something akin to the biggest and grandest experience I will ever encounter. Now I wasn't under a delusion that people exaggerated the way that a place like this will shape who I am and what I do with the rest of my life.

I always agreed with that statement, even before. Doesn't mean I didn't hate the premise all the same, the idea something like this could be so impactful rubbed me the wrong way. The fact of life however is that we cannot pick and choose the things that shape us, nor can we decide the events that force us to grow in directions we may not have first assumed.

It was never anything dire or overexaggerated, I wasn't relentlessly bullied in high school and therefore unable to adapt to the change of pace that college backhands you with. To my very own surprise as well, I wasn't raised to believe that schoolwork is the only important thing in a young life, or that it is the catalyst to whether you are successful in the future or not.

Unlike a lot of people that I knew in High School that were raised that way, I don't think we are entirely different people for that reason, but I don't have the desire to rebel against the schoolwork the way they do. As it never confided me.

You see, in my head the thing that made the most sense to me was saving all my first experiences for college because it was the one place worth having the, at the very same time I still thought I would be moving across the country for college. Everyone else I have met, decided being a seasoned professional at all my firsts, was the better route, now I might agree.

I had the grades to fly, the scholarship offers to make it happen but never the bravery to stand up to my parents and say; I am leaving. They thought they could still indoctrinate me into the family business, real estate, I never had any intention of giving into their whims.

But crushing their dreams, the mediocre hopes for the daughter I was, as violently as they obliterated mine never came. Moving away without the thought of coming back looked like it would shatter them, and so I stayed here on the bargain of studying what I really wanted.

I never told them that's what I applied for anyway.

In reality, I was comfortable letting them think I had won because the desire to run away wasn't as strong when the opportunity finally came. Letting them believe I would come waltzing back for the family business after a four-year base course of some silly little hobby I had was one of the crueller things I have ever done.

After accepting the fact that I wouldn't be going where I had really wanted at the time, that the place really didn't matter in the end because I was still out of their reach and finally able to live life. In my head, my friends would be getting plan b every weekend and they would be carrying me out of frat parties, I thought high school was the place you avoided if un-consensual groping wasn't your thing.

Unfortunately for me, it meant that by the time I got to college I was viewed as some kind of virgin-prude-freak. Labelled as the one who cared more about schoolwork than having a good time, just because I wasn't rebelling, only because my parents never cared enough to push it down my throat. They weren't progressive.

In the end, my roommate had no desire to be my chaperone of invite me to any of the parties I thought I was desperate to attend, being uncool was never my problem, being the fun-virgin was. It only served to make me grateful that I wasn't an actual virgin, because I didn't need for that to be my label, or the thing people tried to rid me of.