This past Saturday was graduation. Not my own graduation, but the graduation of many of my friends who finished up their undergraduate degrees just a year before I’ll finish mine. As I spent the day celebrating their accomplishments I was overwhelmed, by a weird mix of nostalgia and grief. Instead of thinking of how I only have a year left, I considered continuously how that group of people would never be in one place again. Many of those people I will never cross paths with again.

I have the pleasure of studying at a small school within an even smaller community: the conservatory of theatre arts. I know everyone even if I don’t know them well. You get to know the group dynamic and how others fit in together and who you are within that group. It’s a family in a way, a dysfunctional one, but a family nonetheless. The reality is that even if some of those people absolutely hated their time here. Or if they’re terrified to move on, they were already part of something larger. There’s something powerful about being a group of students unashamedly going out into the world to create art.

Several years back a Yale student, Marina Keegan, published an article in the Yale Daily News just before her 2012 graduation entitled “The Opposite of Loneliness.” It starts out, “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life, what I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”

And in some ways even when this place is so hard to be in and pursuing an arts degree feels futile, that’s exactly how I feel here. Even when I’m too busy to make deeper friendships or get to know someone a little better, I know I’m in this together with a lot of other people. I know that, frequently, I’m in a room full of people that love each other in some way and it’s hard to be lonely. It’s not perfect. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s something.

So I stood around a BBQ and watched as graduates celebrated, played games, spent time with their families and introduced their siblings to their friends from the past four years. I stood and tried to hold onto that memory of an experience that’ll never happen again. I’ll probably never be with all those people again. There are some that I know I will see many times throughout my life. Others I’ll cross paths with from time to time, our world is smaller than we think. But the conservatory class of 2016 and even the smaller groups within it will probably not be together again, and in some ways, that’s overwhelming and at the same time so exciting. I hope each and every one of you go off and find something exciting to be a part of, thanks for contributing to my life these past three years, no matter how small a contribution or if you didn’t even know you did. You’ve helped make my time here something practically indescribable.