My last week of college.

I don’t really know what day or what time it is, my head is a tornado of art reviews and final edits of final papers, but I do know this. I do know that this is, somehow, the end already. And that it feels almost nothing like what I thought it would.

THE LAST WEEK OF COLLEGE

It’s a funny thing, blogging, because you are essentially cataloging your life for all the world to see. I started this space back in February, back when this week was so far away I could barely conceptualize the actuality of it. I understood it, I thought about it, but it didn’t feel real.

It still doesn’t. Maybe I will fall into a puddle of tears on that last day without notice, maybe it will hit me out of nowhere and I will write the emotional goodbye post and it will be a whole thing. You can probably count on that, actually. But as the days fall out of reach, as one rolls right into the next, swallowing yesterday faster than I can savor the taste of it, it is occurring to me that I have been thinking about this graduation all wrong.

My last graduation was seared by a global pandemic and paired nicely with a 2020 bottle of heartbreak from my first break up. My quarantined family held an isolated graduation party in my backyard two days after said breakup, brilliant timing, and I sat there broken, on the verge of completely shattering the entire time, watching the triangle banners bearing the colors of my university flap in the wind while I grieved high school, dead teenage butterflies, and the world as any of us knew it to be before lock down.

It was not a happy thing. It was a terrible, raw, aching, denaturing thing that still hurts like a wound that never healed properly.

Meaning, that’s what graduations became for me, wounds that ache and ache and tear you open on the middle of the sidewalk when you see a class of high school seniors practicing for their graduation in the middle of your college campus, reminding you of a world that dissolved beneath your feet.

So naturally, the thought of having another one has been an emotional affair. All semester I have been preparing for heart ache and grief that here, one week before my last day, is still barely anywhere to be found. It does come, slowly, gently, when I realize that I am probably walking through this hallway or sitting on this grass or buying this coffee for the last time. It comes quietly in the lecture hall when I count the hours left of listening to my professor wax poetic about god knows what for the last time.

But slowly, gently, and quietly, is all. It comes and goes within the same moment. It is nothing like what I expected.

REMEMBER THAT THERE IS ALSO JOY

Which made me realize, graduations are supposed to be happy things, aren’t they? I prepared for the grief, I prepared for painful goodbye, but I did not prepare for the joy. I did not know that it would be there too, holding my other hand. I did not think about the pure happiness and excitement that has infiltrated my life in these past few weeks. Maybe it’s because I am so distracted with this editorial internship or Christmas or the general exhalation that accompanies reaching the end of another year, but I think that I am far more excited for whatever is coming next than I am sad as to what has passed.

I didn’t anticipate that. I didn’t plan it that way.

It just turns out that there are other things, bigger and brighter things, for me to love.

Who knew.

Love, m.

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