Closing Time

If anyone had asked me eight months ago what I wanted most in the world, the answer would've been simple: I wanted to go home. I wasn't ready to live on my own. I didn't want to make new friends or have new experiences. All I wanted was to be in my own room again with my sisters within shouting distance and my mom there to hug me every night, and I wasn't ashamed to admit it. I was counting down the days until the end of the year before fall classes had even started. It seemed like I would be stuck on the top of this mountain for the rest of my life.

It's weird looking back now and realizing those eight seemingly interminable months have flown by faster than I could've ever imagined. Despite my best efforts to avoid people, I made some incredible friends and got involved in activities that I'm going to miss sorely over the four month summer break.

I think this torn feeling is something almost every college student can relate to. We want to go back to the familiar lives we've known for so long, but we're afraid that it won't be the same now. At the same time, our lives here at school have become more familiar than we ever expected them to. So is there a way to look positively at the end of the school year?

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that although this seems like and ending, it's really not. It's not like we'll part ways next week and never see each other again. We'll be back on this campus in just a few short months ready to start a whole new adventure. I can't deny that it's stressful to think about going back home and having parents and family members around all the time. However, I believe that the time we've spent away from home might actually make it easier to appreciate the time we have with our families. Spending time with them has now become the exception, not the rule.

We've all grown a lot since we moved here last August. Our views have changed, our lives have changed, and most of us are unsure how to feel about the impending parting of ways. But without endings, we could never start anything new. If high school hadn't ended, we wouldn't have ever gotten to this campus in the first place. And if nothing else, I am leaving for the summer absolutely positive that we can make this summer great and the next year even greater if we choose to. We can't stop the year from ending. But we can stop ourselves from seeing that ending as a bad thing. We can choose to see this ending as an opportunity to make a new beginning.