My god, they’re all gone.
All the kids a year ahead of me have graduated. Even a couple in my year are gone too, taking advantage of ridiculous numbers of AP credits to get the fuck out of this fine university a year early. God knows I would have if I had the credit.
But somehow it doesn’t feel like the end.
Maybe it’s because I, personally, am not graduating. Maybe it’s because several of them are staying in Chicago, and I’ll still see them all the time. Maybe it’s simply denial.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I know I’ll stay in contact with people I really want to. We all say this after high school, but for some reason, college friends seem to last a hell of a lot longer.
My mom is still friends with a number of people she went to UConn with, and I think that’s part of what gives me comfort over not being able to see a lot of my friends from here much for at least the next year or so.
The other thing, appropriately enough, is the internet.
I know I already spend way too much time on this damn computer, but I find it extremely comforting that I can talk to people online in Atlanta (or Pennsylvania or Boston or wherever the fuck everyone is moving) the same way I talk to people who live two doors down.
And I can read about the trials and the tribulations of everyone I know through stupid things like this weblog. Although I personally try not to deal in profundities, many people do, and I at least find out about the weird things going on in peoples’ lives.
And when it gets right down to it, life is nothing but a collection of weird things that happen to you in some sort of sequence, and the stories you tell about those things.
Nobody ever spends a great deal of time talking about their daily routine of work, they talk about times when something interesting, amusing, annoying, bizzare, or otherwise out of the ordinary happens.
Nobody talks about the routine of their relationship, at least not after they’ve been going out for more than a couple of months and have realized that they’re boring the living shit out of their friends by incessantly talking about the minituae of their relationship.
No, it’s the oddities, the great stories, and the profound thoughts that make life fantastic, and I hope I get to read them, hear them, and maybe even once in a great, great while, speak them, for a long time to come.
Congratulations to the graduates, and you guys look incredibly dippy in those hats.
Feel free to make fun of me in exactly 363 days. You better fucking believe I’m counting.