Last week, when I finished my first month living abroad in the orange tiled apartment of a French woman named Nadine, I walked down to a bar where a girl I know sings in Spanish every Tuesday night. It was like a teeny technicolor version of Rick’s cafe from Casablanca – a cramped room dimly lit in red, the windows fogged with heat, a man at a wooden piano and a boy on bongos. The girl sang through the hazy space and waved as I unwound my scarf, the few people inside swaying sentimentally to the music.

I’m here on a gap program in Toulouse, a rosy town where McDonald’s serves espresso in delicate paper cups and people roll their own cigarettes in their laps on the metro. They talk in Southern mixes of French and Spanish on the terraces, while moving through the pink alleyways in a rainy aftermath of winter. In her apartment on the fourth floor, Nadine has decorated my bedroom with American flag patterned curtains. We drink tea from ceramic bowls at night and watch reality TV. There is so much I want to tell her, but I can only communicate so deeply until I run out of haphazard French sentiments.

I applied to this program after being rejected from twelve colleges and graduating high school knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life and without a concrete idea of how I was going to do it. During my final year at an arts boarding high school in rural Northern Michigan, I hauled myself through the application process because I couldn’t visualize the immediate future without the structure of a formal education. But there was no school I was honestly passionate about. I was immersed in the immediacy and creativity and community of senior year, and worried I wouldn’t find that preciousness again as spring thawed across campus and classmates found their way. “I got in!” my roommate yelled one early morning in April, jumping out of her bed and into mine. “I got in, I got in!” We spent that night celebrating the way we could, dancing with our neighbors down the hall after our dorm curfew. I ate PopTarts on the carpeted floor as she recolored her hair with boxed dye in our bathroom sink, nostalgic for what I would miss after we moved on. Later that week, I was rejected from all but one of the colleges I applied to, the singular acceptance paired with a miniscule financial aid package.

Going home after graduation was peculiarly surreal and bittersweet, largely because I moved back in with my parents at eighteen instead of the other way around. But I found ease without educational structure by finding two jobs. I learned how to introduce myself to people I didn’t go to high school with, to get over the fact that I failed miserably at my first round of college applications and that I didn’t study enough for the ACT, because none of my coworkers cared about that. Because the other things I did during my senior year – the vending machine pranks, the winter nights in the cafeteria, the plays and concerts and shows I watched that featured my peers, the nights in the snow, the nights in the spring, the night after graduation in the park at Sleeping Bear Dunes – that’s what fuels my conversations, what has shaped me into a person who can talk about anything to anyone. At home again, I threw myself into the college application process for a second time, balls-deep. I applied to the gap program and received a travel scholarship. I flew to France. I started volunteer work at an elementary school and a small grocery store for disadvantaged families. I got lost in Nadine’s vibrant neighborhood looking for the neon sign the girl told me hangs above the bar where she performs.

My first real, possible college acceptance came that night, while I was making my way down the narrow street – Congratulations! We look forward to welcoming you into our community. “Congratulations,” I repeated quietly to myself, slipping inside once I found the place. The girl singing mouthed salut! through the soft room. Another girl I knew was already there, her legs crossed under the bar. She kissed me on both of my cheeks – “Ça va?” I draped my coat over the barstool next to hers as the man at the wooden piano greeted us with his thick mixture of French and Spanish into the quiet microphone, thanking us for joining the Tuesday night family. A wine glass full of euro coins rested on a coffee table near the bongos. There were only a few others inside, dancing with their shoulders to the music. An older woman began to cry gently when the next song began. She pressed a cocktail napkin to her eyes and smiled as the piano man blew her a familiar kiss.

It’s that kind of emotion, these sacred, foreign experiences, that have deepened my understanding of the forms an education can take beyond classrooms. I’ve learned more about what it means to be alive by spending this year in the “real” world than I feel I could have on a college campus. When it is time to begin my freshman year, wherever that may be, I’ll feel more confident in seizing my schooling. I’ll be ready to utilize my uniquely honed voice, make friends by sharing my story and listening to theirs, grow and flourish by recognizing the inner narratives of my new peers and working to foster a colorful community.

In the bar, as the night swayed on, more people I knew arrived, friends I had met who moved here from Iran, Chile, Greece, Canada, and Equatorial Guinea, all of us speaking in broken French and undercurrents of English. We sat for awhile, staying warm. Then we stood. Then we danced. “You’re so young!” they told me, laughing, as the bar began to empty and the music grew louder yet softer at the same time. “You have so many chances!” We laughed, and we hugged, and I walked back to Nadine’s late with warmth in my chest, passing the open windows of first floor apartments where cigarettes glowed orange people flicked ash onto the sidewalk and talked with passersby asking for a light, thinking about how many chances I really do have.

Olivia Alger was a 2016 YoungArts Finalist and a 2017 Presidential Scholar in the Arts Nominee. Her work has appeared in ten journals and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, among others. She lives in the Chicago suburbs. She graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy as a creative writing major and is headed to University of Rochester to continue studying her passion.

Common App essays — rejected, Colorado College