Looking forward

About this time in the semester i get existential.
What do I have to look forward to? More school. Always. More school. More papers that I don't want to write, that will get read once and discarded. More stress and stomachaches and tears. More feelings of the deepest inadequacy. And then I slog home for the summer or for winter break and I drag myself back here to do it again.
I guess now I can see the end of the tunnel to break the cycle. One more year. 365 days from now I will be finishing up my last papers and graduating. I know I can do it, graduating from college is no big feat.
But I do get sick of having nothing but small things to keep me afloat. A dinner out at a chinese restaurant, an afternoon of beer and gossip with some friends is all I hold onto. Summer is desolate, and then back to school, where I will have to deal with the fact that all of my friends have graduated and I'm alone.
And thinking about the future brings an insane amount of anxiety. I'll be a real person one day I guess, with bills to pay and a job (hopefully) to go to. I'll have real furniture that is mine and might not even be made in a prison. I'll have a real girlfriend and a kitchen where we can make breakfast burritos the next morning. I will have friends too, but I want to still talk to the ones I have now because I have finally fallen where I am supposed to be.
In my real life, as opposed to the life I've been living for the past 20 years, my refrigerator will always have a beer or two for company, my cupboards always some kind of exciting cookies and a wooden chest of teas. In my real life, my apartment will be fashionably cluttered with the remnants of this other life which I have lived: pictures from summer camp, posters, mismatched plates, mugs, cups, utensils, furniture, appliances and an ever-present animal. I will always have an afghan to drape around me while I work, I will always have the heat a little too low in the wintertime so that I can snuggle myself under blankets at night. I will have too many books, or perhaps just the right number, because I do not believe that bookshelves should be used for anything but books.
I will live in an old apartment building that has its peculiarities, and I will like them. The third stair might squeak and the front door might stick in the summer heat, but it all just makes the experience of living there one I will remember. I will have a sunroom where I keep my plants, where my dog will like to sleep and where I will sleep in the summer so that I can get up with the sun.
In reality, in one year I will probably be in the same boat that I am in now where my life is nothing more than a few hundred words on a silly blog.