Limbo: College Admission Essay Sample

After seven straight hours of headache-inducing, nail-biting delay, Flight 2237’s touchdown into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was met with an exhausted yet raucous cheer from every passenger on board. As we disembarked, my mother moved to join the throng of irritated travelers swarming the panicked employee manning the information desk, instructing me to watch my brother and sister as she attempted to rebook our connecting flight. The time was three-fifteen in the morning, and apart from the current bedlam at the gate, the airport was practically deserted. Flickering fluorescent lights cast a dim, alien-like glow over the scuffed tile floor of the terminal and turned the barred entrances of Wendy’s and Starbucks into something more closely resembling jail cells. The only signs of life were the few blanket-wrapped lumps curled up near phone outlets, occasionally shifting uncomfortably or adjusting the backpacks shoved under their heads in impromptu pillows. I remember the strangest sort of feeling settling over me, and it was only once harried businessmen and vacation-bound families braving the inexpensive six-o’clock flights began to fill the halls with their chatter that this fog finally swept away. Since that day, I’ve slowly come to notice more and more of these places where reality seems stretched a bit thin, where the fingers of one world don’t quite interlace with the fingers of another and bring about an eerie kind of limbo. Empty schools and empty parking lots. Stairwells. Convenience stores on an unfamiliar roadside late at night. Any open space where the air smells electric and dark clouds rumble overhead. Those fleeting precious moments before your alarm goes off as you lay staring up at the dark ceiling, much too aware of every atom in your body. These moments seem fleeting, as if they were meant only to last long enough to sweep a strange uncertainty into our lives before the alarm finally starts ringing or we dash into our houses at the first drops of rain. The reason why none of these places slots neatly into our vision of ordinary life is precisely because of this extraordinary impermanence. We are never meant to stay. A rundown 7-11 by the side of an empty highway in Montana is only meant to lure passerby with its flickering, moth-covered lights long enough for them to buy a pack of Mentos and an iced tea before wearily climbing into their car and setting back out onto the winding road. They are portals: connectors of the past and the future, this world and the next, and this is why they never seem quite right to those of us accustomed to bustling streets and the blinding light of day. I, however, have come to appreciate the quiet comfort of such moments. Untethered by the obligations and distractions of the fast-paced world, my mind can float up, up like helium balloon and hover in a gentle sort of tranquility. Whenever I wander into an empty wing of the art museum or come across a suburban pond reflecting an overcast sky, I feel as if my thoughts run with a greater depth and clarity than their usual coffee-muddled confusion. Rather than worry about a thousand mundane concerns, here I can cast the net of my thought a little bit wider than I normally would. What kind of feelings did the people on the world's first commercial flight have? I wondered as I sat on the cold airport floor a thousand miles away from home. Would flight ever become obsolete? Will we be able to teleport from the comfort of home one day—toss our atoms to the wind and slip through the chinks in space like wizards? I find myself musing on planets trillions of light years away and prehistoric creatures that dwell in the depths of the sea—feeling, as Lewis Carroll charmingly put it, more ''fairyish'' than a lover of reason ought to. But strict reason can never fully nourish a mind, and therefore the separation from reality these portals offer is so refreshing that I rarely find myself wishing to venture through and into the world on the other side. Instead, I lean in the doorway, relax in the portal, and there I find my calm.