My spring break this year was lame. Besides playing Smash Bros Brawl for more hours than I care to recall and seeing my family, I did nothing. My spring break last year was amazing, so that’s what I’ll talk about instead.
Last spring break, I got kicked out of my house, bought a pair of black and white Nike’s, stayed overnight at a frat house in Houston, ate the best meal of my life at a Luby’s, went to the hospital and took a trip to the beach.
My friends and I met up at the frat house and left around 4 a.m. to “beat traffic.” When we arrived on the beach around six, it was freezing out so we decided to nap in the car. When it finally got warm, I began digging a hole in the sand like they did on Friends. I can’t be on a beach for more than ten seconds without trying to dig a really big hole or building a sandcastle (though my sandcastles are little more than mounds).
After my friends were done collecting seashells and running back from the waves, they started helping me. Pretty soon, our hole in the sand was formidable. It had walls, trenches and seaweed for aesthetic purposes. What our useless goal lacked was common sense. Halfway through digging our hole (which I could comfortably sit three in), the tide started to rise and washed away all of our hard work.
I never seem to learn that every time I go to the beach and dig a hole or build a sandcastle, they will get destroyed. Inevitably, the hole gets filled with grains of sand, possibly from an ocean away. The sandcastle gets swept away and probably ends up on some beach in Barcelona.
We left the beach and dropped into a friend’s beach house to visit. After that, I came back to Huntsville and got into Shenanigans for free. It was easily one of the most memorable weeks of my life.
Whenever I sit down and think about my career goals or how much I’d love to be a writer, I reminisce about my trips to Galveston. I remember building something that will be forgotten the hour after I leave. I wonder if my life will amount to more than a hole in the sand or a castle on the beach.