sad, and heart-wrenching. you don't know how else to describe it.
you're approaching graduation, and slowly starting to see your campus, your home away from home (that eventually became home), through the eyes of an alumna.
Slowly, yet instantly, your lasts begin to accumulate.
Last coffee & pastry from the arts cafe.
Last paper printed from the library.
Last haphazard multiple choice question selection.
You picked "c" again because it has always felt safe.
And don't even get started on the last moments in your dorm.
Your last classes.
Last walks around the lakes.
The best and worst thing about lasts is oftentimes, you are not aware (fully at least)
of the true finality of these experiences.
But that's what commencement is for... right?
Not directly, but sort of. Because commencement means 'beginning', not 'end'. We talk about all that we have done to get to this faithful graduation day, and it is good that the end is about beginning, but even the beginning ends.
So that space between the beginning of the end and the end of the end is quite strange.
You realize you will no longer attend school here, or maybe even anywhere, starting in just a few days.
Yet you're walking through the student center listening to a song you listened to when you walked around campus for the very first time.
Except everything seemed faster then.
Now, it all seems slow, perhaps even frozen
in time.
Years ago, you didn't know the ins and outs of how this place was laid out; how it functioned.
You didn't see fuzzy memories at certain tables and buildings, and in certain nondescript corners.
You couldn't hear the ghostly 'Hello!'s echoing, familiar voices greeting you that now haunt the sidewalks
instead of traveling along them.
You are no longer in the moment when you started to call
this place home.
Except it's your last day of classes, and you've been here
quite a while, but it is, in fact, still home.
But something is fading, unclear in this
space
between
spaces
The faces aren't familiar anymore,
and years ago, that would be something you
jokingly wished for, perhaps just to be left alone so you didn't have to pause your music.
But now, you long for that closeness in some way.
You'd find comfort in that sort of chaos.
And maybe you already started your post-grad job
before graduation because you needed to distract yourself
from the fact that it is all
so liminal.
a place between places, spaces between spaces,
a life lived between lives.
Where you're able to recognize that though your worst times were hosted there,
your best times also were.
and maybe it all wasn't truly just a well thought-out blur, because you found so much safety here, and learned to create that for yourself.
Without this place, it would've been tough to deal with what had been dealt.
This place lifted you up, showed you what you could do, and you created a life and love for yourself that you're starting to see now that you're through.
It hurts, yes, I know: to say goodbye to this chapter.
but it remains part of you, now and thereafter.
side note from the future: don't rush into things, just listen to yourself, because you are all you have
and the rest is what you have felt.
graduated grad school may 2025. yay!
