I still remember the night before I turned nineteen. I was lying on the top bunk of my dorm in the ITHAKA compound on Crete, and I felt like maybe someday I might be beautiful.
I was feeling a lot of other things, too. Thinking about my nineteen-y-ness inevitably made me think about my incipient twenty-y-ness (twenty-ness?), and all I could focus on were the things I hadn't done yet. I'd never been to a party with people my own age. I hadn't sung a solo longer than one line. I hadn't been kissed (let alone that other thing). I'd never written a paper longer than five paragraphs, and less than a year from then, I'd be at Yale University. College. People did things in college, right? They kissed people and wrote papers and went to parties. Probably.
And because of my gap year, I'd be almost twenty years old when I got there. I'd be even more behind.
