When my parents reminisce about moments long ago, they always mention how it feels as if they happened just the day before. I’d always assumed that was a hyperbole. But as I think back to one of the final days of 10th grade, it truly feels like yesterday.
The sun was beginning to dip into the west, and my best friend and I leaned over the blue railway of our school’s stairs. We were leaving school late due to a class senate meeting that ran over time. I asked her, “Can you believe we’ll graduate in two years?” and she begged me not to remind her.
We had no idea what we wanted to study, or where, or with whom—only that it would happen in less than 1,000 days. It still seemed so abstract back then, so impossible, until it happened.
When I counted down the minutes of our last day of school, I half expected the clock to stop. I wondered if it would stay frozen at 2:19 pm, if only to keep us in class a minute more. But it did not. So, we cheered, we cried, and we left.
That moment three years ago and that moment one year ago both feel like yesterday. And, last week, I had another one of these moments that I believe will play in a loop of my future nostalgia.
Sitting on a bench by the Res, I checked my calendar and saw that my return flight home was less than a month away. I’ll admit that part of me thought “finally,” while the other thought, “I’ll graduate in three years”— a thought infinitely more terrifying than graduating high school.
When 12th grade is over, you just keep studying. Yes, you are living alone, and yes, you have to do laundry (which is a daunting task in and of itself), but it is still school! It’s what you’ve known your entire life. Graduating from college is something so monumentally different. In three years, I’ll be working and paying for my groceries (or maybe I’ll go to grad school just so I can keep studying).
But if a moment three years ago feels like it was yesterday, who says the next three won’t go by just as fast? Don’t judge me but I feel like I’m looking at my 50-year plan, and it all seems like it’ll be tomorrow. I haven’t started studying for the LSAT. My best-selling book is nowhere near ready for publication. I’m yet to stumble upon a husband. And oh God, I have to think about my future kids! There goes life, and I didn’t even try to bring about world peace.
The epiphany of the passage of time is a reckoning each and every time I experience it. As a planner and an overthinker, I can get lost in just how fast the future seems to come at me, but I do try to relish in the moments that feel like yesterday.
I can still hear the screeching of little girls that evening in 10th grade, can taste the salt of my tears from the last day of high school, and can still feel that mixture of excitement and terror from when I checked my calendar last week. And so, looking back on this past whirlwind of a year, I can savor it. Its movements are slow and sluggish and amazing like that afternoon coffee with friends, a late night in the library, or trying not to laugh during class. Somehow, between each suppressed giggle and yawn, I made friends, learned things I hadn’t dared to imagine, and discovered parts of myself I didn’t know existed.
The passage of time is pretty daunting, but it is nothing new. It is in moments like these, when the sun is setting on your final freshman year, that it feels all the more real. In three weeks, I can say I’ll graduate in three years. I’ll just have to trust that, like I did three years ago, it will all work out. So, whether you’re a freshman or anywhere closer to your graduation date, I implore you to not lose sight of the beauty in the small, slow moments, even when the future feels just around the corner.
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