As my senior year comes to an end, an air of nostalgia and deep sadness has seemed to suddenly pass over me. Like a tidal wave… rushing over me all too fast and suddenly sucking all of the oxygen out of the room… leaving me to gasp for air. It’s suffocating.

In a few months, my room will be empty. The warm glow that emitted from my room will be gone and a blackness will replace it. The smell of pumpkin spice radiating from the candle on my bedside table will have disintegrated into the air, replaced instead with the nothing more than the smell of faded memories and a sense of who I was. Cobwebs will fill the bookshelves and the sound of an episode of  Friends that once emanated from my bedroom will be inevitably replaced with a stifling silence. Everything will be different. I will no longer come home to my little sister as she races to me and engulfs me in a giant bear hug. I will no longer be there to tuck her into bed and whisper “I love you more than the moon,” as she closes her eyes. I will no longer wake up from a text at 3 AM from my mom begging me to make cookies and watch Titanic with her. Our late night ventures to the 24 hour McDonald’s for coffee to support our night-owl tendencies will have no place in my new world at MSU. I will no longer spend my summer days sneaking out to the park with my friends in the perfect amalgam of the early mornings and late nights to swing on the abandoned tire swing and look at the glow of the summer sky.

The fact that my world will suddenly be turned upside down within a matter of months, that everything will be different yet the world’s breath still continues the slow harmonic measures that it did once before I graduated and left everything I had ever known for the 18 years of my life. The world will continue to go on… students will still continue to shuffle in and out of the crowded hallways traveling in packs of three. The student section of Friday night football games will soon be filled with the next generation of Rangers to come through the double doors, my usual spot by the banister overlooking the field and the blaring light emitted from the spotlights will soon be taken by a group of giggling freshmen as they oogle at the football players. I’ll be gone, no longer a student at FHC and no part of my home at Auburn Street, yet life will go on. I feel as if that is the hardest part: accepting that a seemingly catastrophic change in my universe will only be a small insignificant part of everyone else’s. Putting my goodbye into perspective is the hard part.

This may seem cliche, but this is not a goodbye. This is not a period in my story, but more of a semicolon of my life here among the eccentric streets of East Town and the harmonic rocking of the Great Lakes waves. Sure, life may go on and my voice may only be a shot into the void, but at least I know that at one moment in my life, I was here. I was sitting in the desks of FHC and body painting for the basketball games. I was here, and whether my mark on this world be big or small, I know that the sparkly pink brick with the crown will still be in Mr. George’s room twenty years from now. I know that the pencil scratching of my initials and Leonardo DiCaprio from freshman year will still be etched into one of the desks in room 107. At one point of my life, I was here and I was a big part of the small world I had become so accustomed to. At one point, I stumbled through life here, leaving trinkets of my existence sprinkled in the hallways of FHC and within the blue waters of Lake Michigan. So, this is not a goodbye, but a thank you. A thank you for letting me leave bits and pieces of the person I was and for letting me leave a small smudge of a mark on the world that I was once a part of.