"The story of our life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye... until we meet again" - Jimi Hendrix

May 27, 2014; the year I graduated high school. The year that 500+ kids and I pounded the stage at SECU arena, clad in our graduation caps and gowns, to finally get that 8x11 piece of paper that says "we finally did it."

With the sea of people that are in my class, it was difficult to make yourself stand out. Most people I knew found their happy places in the gym or at the football stadium, sweating their afternoons away to uphold championship titles. Others thrived in academic excellence, joining all of the honor societies and making sure that their college resume looked as pristine as possible. And maybe they also spent their mornings with an instrument attached to their hip, skillfully plucking at the strings to the piece of sheet music that they've devoted their time to learning.

Regardless of what my fellow classmates did in their spare time, my alma mater bred a lot of exceptional and very intelligent people, a lot of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting and becoming very close with. The summer of 2014 became one of the most bittersweet summers I've ever experienced. It was different from any other summer, even the one four years back when we revoked our crown as cocky 8th graders to being at the bottom of the food chain... again. It was the summer before our freshman year of college, three long months before we got to bury our noses in books and spend our nights silently shedding tears all over our laptops to the thought of finishing a 15-page paper due by 11:59 pm.

I remember starting off my freshman year with a strong group of people who I called my "friends." After four years of separation, whether it be due to different classes or merely just a conflict of interests, I left high school with only a handful of people who I still remain in consistent contact with. That summer was difficult, and it became exponentially more difficult since.

It's 2016 and my friends and I are halfway through our college career, which also means that we're getting ready to "adult" in just a matter of 24 months.

To me, that seems incredibly daunting.

I've realized that, along with transferring to a different university from a community college, I am saying goodbye to my childhood. Three of my closest friends from high school live in York, Boston and Northern Kentucky. One of the two that still live within driving distance from me is currently engaged and is set to get married next fall. While everyone else is growing up, I feel like I'm still stuck in the middle of closing the doors of my childhood and pushing open the gates of adulthood. Soon enough, though, we all have to find that one thing that forces us to grow up. To me, it's saying "see you soon" to those that mean the most to me.

When my friends moved away, it struck me as that final push to basically getting myself ready to grow up. The thought of spending my future in a career that not only supports myself, but my future family as well, is incredibly intimidating. This is not to say that we should shut the doors on our child-like selves, the ones that spent hours on end in front of a TV or computer screen, in attempts to gain EXP points. No.

But life is too short to not think about the next step, to neglect to realize that one day we're going to look back on our 20s and wish that we had done something different.

So, old self, love you, good bye.