One day you'll be driving to school on your last day of your last year and you'll be thinking about how you're going to be late and complaining about how tired you are in your head the whole way there, and you certainly won't be thinking about noticing how short the drive seemed to get. And before you know it, you will be sitting in your car in what has been your spot for the past nine months and you'll hurriedly grab up your bag and your things and rush into the building so you can sit through what will be your last day of the classes you have laughed and sighed and tapped your foot through for the past year. And you will sit through those forty-five minute periods on your last day and you may not notice it, but while you have been in school with your class and have known them since you all played tag together at recess, each and every one of them has a future ahead of them that will take them away from home or away from you, and you may never see any of them again.

And while you are sitting in your last class on your last day just tap-tap-tapping your fingers waiting for your last high school bell to ring so you can walk out of your last class and out of your last door, I hope you remember that today is the last day you will ever walk these corridors as a student, not an alum. And I hope you remember every good time and every bad time you had within those hallways because you will never get back your last first day, or that night where friends became family, or your senior prom, or your last awards night, or get to walk across that stage as a student receiving a scholarship, or even get to walk through your school as someone who is still part of it, instead of an outsider.

So please, cherish this last day of high school because while it may not have been the best four years of our lives, we may have learned some of the most important lessons during the quiet moments where everything just stopped between scrambling for quizzes and letting loose on that last wild Friday night. And in a few days, all of us are going to graduate, and we’re going to be standing in line waiting for our name to be called so we can walk across that stage and take a piece of paper with a handshake to show the world the proof that we did it. We made it despite what they said, and we couldn’t be more alone or more connected all at once. And, in that moment, we will forget what it was like to be so lonely and yet so happy and free as we plant our feet forward and gaze towards our future. And I will hope we all achieve our dreams, because we made it even when we weren’t supposed to, or even when we thought we weren’t going to, and I couldn’t be more proud of the people I was able to walk side by side through life with for the last four years because they will always be the family we chose, and that is what makes all the difference.