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Life Hack: Never Come Back From Spring Break

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Photo by SOFCOR / CC0

“See you in a week!” you called out to your roommates as you rolled your suitcase out the door on the Thursday before spring break. Those suckers had no idea that this was the last time they’d ever see you. Because you were never coming back from break.

What will you do instead? Well, wherever the world takes you. Maybe you’ll head on down to Kansas and live off of the land. Perhaps a kind family will take you in as one of their own, and you’ll make a living by chopping wood or harvesting corn.

Or maybe you’ll find yourself drafted into the circus, where you’ll discover your hidden talent for balancing things on your head. You’ll travel the world and see all kinds of things that you’ve only ever dreamed of.

Or maybe you won’t join the circus, but instead you’ll join a group of vigilantes who stop crime but are too modest to accept recognition. Until one day you get framed for a crime you didn’t commit and receive a life sentence in prison, only to uncover a conspiracy when you befriend an inmate who is secretly an undercover FBI agent, and you help her bring the corrupt system to justice, and you fall in love and spend several months together until she has to go undercover again with the FBI, so you write a dramatic novel about your tragic love which becomes a bestseller and then you meet the President and get to be on the Ellen show but none of is all that meaningful to you without the love of your life by your side, so you plead with the FBI to tell you where she is, and they tell you that they have no record of anyone with her name, but you insist and finally they find the woman who matches your description but it turns out she was never an agent, it was all a lie, and there's a massive manhunt to find this woman who has been impersonating an FBI agent for 12 years and they keep you on the case because you understand her better than anyone, and at first you’re reluctant to help because you never really knew her, really, it was all just lies and deceit and you showed her your dream journal for God’s sake and you got nothing back except betrayal, but eventually you decide that you’ll help find her if just so that you can look her in the eye and find out if any of it was real, so you help the FBI look for 25 long years, and now you’re somehow 98 years old and on your deathbed and you never accomplished anything, but as you take your final breaths she comes into your room and she hasn’t aged at all, it can’t be real, but you know that somehow it is real, and suddenly you aren’t angry anymore, you forget the deceit and the lies and the sorrow and the misery and you finally understand that nothing is ever real or fake, nothing means anything because you finally figured out the real purpose of life…

Or maybe you’ll live in your parents' basement. Who knows?

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