To the People I’m Grateful to Know,

I wrote my first article in December called "What We Leave Behind", talking about legacies and the footprints we leave in other people’s memories. It’s five months later, and now I’m bracing myself for one of the hardest goodbyes I’ll have to face. There’s a lot of feels happening right now so, bear with me.

They tell you that college will be some of the best years of your life. They tell you to take it all in, slowly, because time is going to pass by at the speed of light. They tell you this is going to be the place where you’ll meet people who are going to change everything. There’s no denying it—they were right.

But, college was also a lot of things we didn’t expect. There were moments we were prepared for and moments we were very unprepared for. But, the last four years proved that all of the unpreparedness wasn’t always such a terrible thing. Those flickers of real life are what made these years so memorable. They're the things we sometimes didn't want to see coming until they were up close and tangible.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this whole graduating-and-leaving-our-little-bubble-of-UM thing. It hasn’t brought me to my breaking-down point yet (I’m an emotional being, so that's been a surprise) but nevertheless, I know it will sneak up when I’m least expecting it. It’s most certainly there, and I’m ready to let it happen because I know it’s for good reason.

I keep flashing back to those first days in the dorms, when we were all trying to make ourselves a place to call home. And, then I look to today when we’ve all found that home and the people who it wouldn’t be the same without. They say you can’t make a home out of a person, so I say I’m glad to have a home that was filled with the best people. You’re the people who’ve unconditionally supported me, made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe, listened to my shameless attempts at telling funny stories, and have experienced virtually every corner of undergrad life with me.

You see, this article is not about what we leave behind anymore. This is about what we hold onto when we have no choice but to move forward. And, there’s no doubt that will take a bit of getting used to.

I’m no expert at explaining how to deal with all these emotions that we don’t always understand. Especially when the next steps we take are into some great, big unknown where there’s way more of that unprepared, uncertainty coming our way. I wish I knew the best words to string together on this page, but some part of me knows it’s all going to work out. We made it to here, right?

So, to all of you who’ve been there through it all, this last article is a celebration of friendship. Between days spent #AtTheRat, long nights in Club Richter, Dunkin runs, formals, trips to the Keys, Grove nights, and everything else in between, there’s no doubt I’ll be weaving you all into my stories and bragging about you for being the greatest people around. More than that, I’ll be counting down the days until we reunite, even if it won’t be as easy or often as we’d like.

I count my blessings, daily, because UM was the place for our paths to cross. For reasons we may not know, I like to believe there’s always a reason. Maybe there are a million reasons. “We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story."

Thanks for being the irreplaceable part of my story. I’ll be carrying it with me wherever I go.