Bittersweet
By Will Lieber, 18, Illinois
It is time to go.
You may not be ready, but life doesn’t care.
Going to college is bittersweet.
Like sugar, excitement accompanies this leap.
Like black coffee and unsweetened tea,
your life left behind feels incomplete.
Your friends, memories, untied ends, will they remain unchanged?
Or will you come back to a foreign land, a home no longer?
You may feel rushed, not ready,
but this is the way life works.
Go get that career, achieve your dreams,
if you don’t you will be a step behind.
Life slows down for no one,
that’s the bitterness of these times.
This is the first poem I have attempted to write on my own outside of school. I never took much of an interest in poetry until I took AP literature my senior year, and my experiences in that class inspired me to try writing this poem.
As I prepared to go to college and thought about moving out, I dealt with a lot of anxiety about what that would mean for me as a young adult transitioning into adulthood. Writing this poem captured how I felt very accurately, and the writing experience was not only cathartic, but greatly improved how I felt about college because I was able to articulate it.
I hope that many other young adults who are leaving much of what they know behind can relate to my feelings of growing up too fast, and possibly use poetry as a means of coping with their own anxieties regarding the future.
