The act itself of saying goodbye feels inadequate. I’m not just saying goodbye to my friends, or to the town where I have lived in for the past 15 years.
I’m saying goodbye to my life.
Every single thing that has ever been constant: eating chilaquiles with my family on Sundays, making eye contact with my sister whenever my parents say something questionable, reading the Ethicist in my (good) British accent and Karissa’s (not entirely terrible) one. Everything will be gone.
And it’s not something that is just momentary. I live these last few days knowing that this is the closest I’ll ever be with certain people for the remainder of my life. Never again will my friends and I share the seven hour school day together. Even after college ends, we’ll get jobs and homes, sentenced by adulthood to have our friendships inevitably strain. Never again, will I experience my home the same way I did when I was a child. Being driven alongside my sister to school and having my brother be picked up by the bus.
It will never be the same.
Even the seemingly gross blood-stained decaying band aid from two days ago on my vanity reminds me of this. How I won’t be standing on my tippy toes in the kitchen whenever I get hurt, trying to reach the bandaids at the very top of the cabinet.
I do my strenuous morning walk each morning, walking in my platforms cursing the fact that Mr. Filkins’ classroom is so far away. And yet it appears that I take those few feet for granted, since soon enough that distance will be bordering 200 miles.
It’s so often that you hear people say “time flies.” It always feels so rehearsed. As if it were a poorly written script that has been passed down from generation to generation. So that inescapably, the saying always finds its way to you.
It used to always ignite a sort of internal eye roll from me, and yet now it seems like that bewitched script has been bestowed upon me.
Because now, I’m here.
And it feels as though just yesterday I was frantic over the fact that I had forgotten my folder at home and my homework was due to my kindergarten teacher.
Just yesterday Mariah was walking up to me at Jackson and taking me to my new second grade class.
Just yesterday I was walking to my parents car after having crossed the sidewalk in middle school.
It doesn’t feel so far-fetched now to claim that time itself is a lie. It feels like an illusion or mirage that has betrayed me.
Soon enough, I’ll be at college. And I know I should be happy, excited, and grateful. But all I feel is terrified. I know it’s one of the best universities in the world and yet it feels like it’s counting down to cage me in.
It would be so incredibly easy to stay.
At times I let myself dream of the possibility, of life just being easy. Being surrounded by all my friends, living at home, not having to leave my cat. There being no change, no definitive challenge.
But I can’t. And I won’t.
That is all. Now excuse me as I metamorphosize into a tree because this is the most emotionally vulnerable/mature (?) I’ve ever been here and I’m actually repulsed. #stanford4thewinn
