Six months ago I sat in the front row of a long, narrow room in La Silla Electrica Comedy Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and thought to myself, I would do anything to perform here. I spent the next six months writing and performing in bars, clubs and restaurants around the city. It was a long and grueling process to produce just ten minutes of material in Spanish, and I bombed many, many times, but all of a sudden something flipped and I started to kill every show. A month ago, two comedians booked me to open for them in a professional show at La Silla Electrica — the moment I have been dreaming of since I started stand up at nineteen.

I’m leaving Buenos Aires in three days. I’ll spend a few weeks at home, and then, in January, I will return to Colorado College and live with my closest friends. I’ll play on the club hockey team, and then the club baseball team, and I’ll play every intramural sport there is to play, and I’ll perform stand up comedy in Colorado Springs and I’ll write sketches with the sketch club and I’ll write my thesis (a satirical novel) and then I’ll graduate.

That, at least, is what I’m supposed to do. I could also scrap that plan, stay in Buenos Aires, and keep performing.

We’re all told to live our lives to the fullest, from Henry David Thoreau moving into the Walden woods in order to “live deliberately,” to Nike’s “Just do it” motto, to the famous Dead Poets Society scene in which Robin Williams whispers “Carpe Diem” to his bewildered young students. All of these images make me shiver with fear and excitement. Like Thoreau, I don’t want to die and realize that I forgot to live.

We don’t talk as much about the subtle art of letting opportunities pass you by.

I remember, when I first started writing short stories, I was obsessed with writing first paragraphs. Those first paragraphs each seemed to suggest their own moving, award-winning story. I could feel the characters and the emotion and the twists and turns flowing from them. But the second paragraph never lived up. And the third was worse. I hated writing second and third paragraphs because writing them meant eliminating every other possible paragraph that could have come next, all of those incredible stories that existed only in my head and never seemed to end up on the page. Sometimes the hardest part of writing one story is not writing all of those other stories.

When I transferred from Harvard to Colorado College, it took me all summer to call all of my friends, because I sobbed every single time and I always needed a few days before I was ready to reach out to the next person. I knew we would always remain friends, but I also knew that there was no way to replace the time we would otherwise have spent together. When I cried, I was mourning two years of parties, study sessions, hang outs and El Jefe’s burrito runs. I was mourning the unwritten paragraphs, even though I was excited about the life I was going to live at Colorado College.

The idea of doing the same thing again with my friends who will be graduating next semester — telling them that I do not know when we will see each other again — is hard to imagine. But six months ago I sat in the front row at La Silla Electrica and dreamed of performing there just once, and now it seems possible to perform there several times a week, as well as in other venues around the city I hadn’t even considered.

Whether I return to Colorado College or Buenos Aires, I’ll have to let some beautiful paragraphs go unwritten. But I’ve never discovered any other way to write a story.