I am only a two weeks into senior year, but it's the beginning of the end. Endings are sad and hard. I've been in school for sixteen years, and if I teach after this, who knows how many more years of school I'll have. But this sixteenth consecutive year of school is my last consecutive year as a student.
Being a student, I have learned - about school, life, friendships, people, cars, kitchens, money, communication, coffee, and more and more and more. And when I think about this allotted time of learning - "college" - ending, and going to a new, yet to be determined place and making new friends and having a new house and a new bookstore and a new coffee shop, the space in my chest where I normally breathe becomes smaller, and my thoughts ricochet off the walls of my head so much more quickly and disorientedly than usual.
My college apartment kitchen on a clean day. Much learning (usually the hard way) has happened here.
New things are scary, and it isn't even time yet for me to embrace or go do my new things, but it's time to know that they are in my foreseeable future, and that one year from now, I will be doing something different than the things I've done before. It makes me feel a little itchy. I like old things and familiar things, but sticking to old and familiar things and growing up are mutually exclusive, and I know which one I'm going to choose, and it's not the easier one.
The hardest and most important part of learning new things is remembering them. The scariest part of doing new things is forgetting the old ones.
I want to remember college and I want to remember this. I want to remember being eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. I want to remember my dorm room and my apartment. I want to remember my people - my friends, my roommates, my classmates, my professors, those random people I was friends with for like two days freshman year and then not anymore at all, and the people I've been running into but never actually spoken to for the past three-ish/four-ish years.
I want to remember the places I went and the things I did and all the times I jumped into the lake. I want to remember learning to cook and re-learning to ride a bike in DC over spring break sophomore year and learning who to call when I ran out of gas for the second time in a month. I want to remember the night when life felt like an episode of Friends. I want to remember watching just the Jim and Pam episodes of The Office on girls' nights. I want to remember how much cookie dough I ate late at night when I should have eaten nothing at all, and how much I don't even regret it.
People say, "this, too, shall pass," during hard times, and it makes said hard times seem less permanent. During grand times and during youth and during college, however, people don't say that. I think they should, because hard times are not the only times that shall pass. All time passes, and the speed at which it does so can't be controlled.
A great (and scary-looking) man once said -
There are no happy endings,
Endings are the saddest part.
So just give me a happy middle
and a very happy start.
- Shel Silverstein
a great (and scary-looking) man
Even if things end well, they end sadly, because endings are fundamentally "the saddest part." The ending of things, although necessary and sometimes a little overdue, is sad. The Head and the Heart says, "all things must end, darling," and they must. If you love something, you should let it go, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt - maybe even a lot.
I had a "happy middle and a very happy start" to college. And (the beginning of) the end of college isn't the end of life. It's a necessary push, an "umph" to what's next - new places, new roles, new patches of sky.
Love,
Lauralicious
