Hi. How are you? It's been almost a year now since we left each other. I've seen some of you,some more than others, and yet still nothing's felt the same, and it's still been a year since we woke up at the crack of dawn to limp sleepily through the school doors.

I always thought I hated it there. When we were together I couldn't wait to leave. I wanted to grow up and move on, put you behind me and never look back. I knew there were memories and people that I was going to miss, but I always thought that those four years would just generally become a repressed memory that I cringed at the thought of.

And then it was gone, and I did grow up, and I got to look back and realize what it was that you gave to me. I realized what you did in my life, what it all meant. In the last days of my freshman year of college, I got to look around. I got to see all the freshmen and sophomores and juniors and seniors, and how they each interacted with each other. And I remembered how I felt, not really so long ago, when we were in each of their positions.

So now I have a thank you of sorts, a love letter, to our four years of High School, and everything that they were.

This is a love letter to freshman Year, when everything was new. The year we learned who are friends were, and what we were going to mean to each other. To our last real year of innocence, when the quizzes were still easy, and we were still, for all intents and purposes, carefree little children.

Freshman year was filled with the excitement of knowing we were all teenagers and thinking about the new opportunities that were coming. The change was perhaps less dramatic than we were expecting, and the life less exciting, but at that time we couldn't wait for it. The people we'd shared kindergarten and middle school with, we were moving onto a new stage of life together. Everything was exciting because we were right at the beginning. And we reveled in it.

This is a love letter to our freshman year, to screaming and hugging each other when we won our field day competition. This is a love letter to homecoming, dancing to "Gangnam Style" and singing "We Are Young" at the top of our lungs, to planning with every club to do a Harlem Shake. This is a love letter to sharing with each other all that we thought that we were going to be. This is a love letter to looking at each other with shock as we learned about the nation's tragedies, and discovered that the world was a little bit colder than we had previously known.

This is a love letter to sophomore year, when we lived for every moment. Sophomore year came and life was carefree. We were separated from each other, we'd each found our niche, but we went out with our best friends every night. No one stressed too much over classes and assignments. Maybe we were just in denial of the fact that school was about to get a whole lot harder. Regardless of the reason, life was a party.

This was the time we were definitely certain that maybe high-school really was going to be the best time of our life. This was the time of finding ourselves. We were merely fifteen and sixteen years old but we thought we were so mature: full adults. We took the few more inches of freedom that we were given and we ran with them as far as we could. Life was all about going out as much as possible- and that summer was the world's biggest party.

Then junior year came and the stress hit us hard. High-school wasn't fun anymore. We didn't believe anyone when they told us we were going to be cracking down, and then it happened. Teachers told us everyday how much our grades mattered now for college applications. Tests got even harder than they had already been. Junior year was nothing but studying and crying about how we'd been up until 3AM studying the night before.

This is a love letter to the last day of junior year, when we cried just as much as the seniors did (of course, a year later we learned that the seniors were crying much more than us.) Because all we could think about was that we had a year left together. It was exciting sure; we were seniors! But everything was very heavy and real. The time had gone so quickly, and we had one year left.

This is a love letter to, above all else, senior year. This is a love letter to the time when time was running out. When every moment was special because every moment was an ending. Every day had something special, something to smile about, something to appreciate.

Though we appreciated everything, we were ready to get out too. We were united under the bond of shared senioritis. We'd been here so long that nothing about our school surprised us. When the cops showed up and all the freshman dropped their jaws in shock, we laughed and rolled our eyes: just another day in the halls we'd known forever.

This is a love letter to senior year when we were one, the family that we had always been but never acknowledged. Senior year, when we forgot all our cliques and past aggressions and existed as one class, one student body, one group of people sharing the universe for the last time. This is a love letter to the hour long conversations with people you'd barely spoken ten words to before, to the meaningful yearbook messages scribbled to people who were merely acquaintances.

This is a love letter to the moments that seemed to have come out of a movie. This is a love letter to the random sing alongs.before class started, to homecoming, to senior day, to prom. This is a love letter to the magic and madness and friendship and family, and the days that seem to have been plucked out of another universe. This is a love letter to the days that I personally call the best days of my life.

This is a love letter to my high-school graduating class. I see, now that I live apart of you, how together we truly were. And that togetherness cannot be found anywhere else no matter how hard you try.

Thank you for everything. I miss you, and I'll always remember our time together.