I graduate high school in eleven days. 

Eleven short days of waking up and realizing how little time I have left here—here in this community of Forest Hills I’ve grown to be a part of, here in this house I’ve known since three years old, here in this bedroom where I’ve laughed and cried and smiled and slept for as long as my memories yield. 

No amount of listening to “Never Grow Up” by Taylor Swift or Macklemore’s “Good Old Days” can fulfill this feeling of emptiness—of sadness, of reminiscence.  No amount of songs about moving on, pushing through—graduating—can resemble this emotional rollercoaster that we call senior year. No amount of rewatching the senior video can make me relive it all. 

Throughout my four years of learning, wandering, and exploring these walls, everything has been everchanging. It’s really a surreal feeling—being “done.” 

No matter how many High School Musical movies I watch for a source of familiarity will heal this feeling that’s so strong that I don’t know what to feel or how to feel it. I did it: I’m graduating high school, I’m going to college, and studying what I’ve spent my high school career doing. I’m moving out; I’m turning eighteen, and I like to tell myself that outweighs the feeling that seems to be overriding the positives. I’m moving for the first time since I was two, I’m leaving my brother and sister, my mom, my dad, my dogs, and my grandma and grandpa who have lived five minutes down the road my whole life. 

My world is changing, and I’m not ready to change with it.

And I graduate from writing for The Central Trend in, well, now. 

As I sit here in numbness, writing my last ever story for this site—my Farewell Column, if you will—I am stuck counting all I’m losing, all my lasts. No more feeling rewarded when putting a story I’m proud of in pending, no more pressing publish on a staff writer’s story who I’ve watched grow—improve—since their very beginning, no more of being able to take all of my worries and stress and feelings built up from life and put it into words to be published, in hopes of helping somebody out there who relates. No more of any of that. 

In my bonfire speech at the Senior Retreat, I said how much I loved everyone and how ecstatic I was to start the best year of our lives together. That felt like yesterday; it felt like yesterday when everyone gathered around the Camp Henry campfire, waiting, watching, one by one as we went up and stood in darkness to say a few words to the people we just now started to get to know. Little did we know, the time flew. 

Now, we are in preparation of putting on our caps and gowns, awaiting the glorious moment of throwing our caps into the sky at the ballpark.

There is so much I still want to say—so much that I believe will fulfill all of the stories I’ll never be able to write again. So this is farewell to the Ranger green hallways I’ve wandered through since freshman year, to all of my teachers that have seriously had such an impact on my life, to the friends that have come and gone, to The Central Trend, to Room 139, to Friday night football games, to Promposals, to Ranger Challenges, to the school and the community that has carved its way into a permanent place in my heart. Thank you.

You’ve been good, FHC.