The warm, salty tears drip down my cold face–I am crying, and I cry for selfish reasons. I cry because although the seniors are the ones that got everything stolen from them, I am only thinking about myself when the drops of despair start trickling down my face.

I think about how I may never see them again, and how desperately I want to say goodbye. How their life was stolen from them, but they were stolen from me. I wish I could tell them that even though I only knew them for less than a year, some of them will stay with me forever. 

I want to tell them that I never felt safer in school than when I would sit in one of the many options of seats in that classroom. I would let them know that it wasn’t the endless options of comfortable places to rest that made the class so welcoming, but rather the people sitting around me. 

After trudging through a long day of school, I would make it to sixth hour, and as hard as I would try to keep my emotions contained, I couldn’t. Something about the room allows you to break down crying because you know someone will be there to help you put yourself back together again. 

So that’s exactly what I did. I cried and cried and cried about some hurtful, terrible thing that happened to me on that day, but the unfiltered kindness of the people in the room put me back together again. 

Maybe I was just a speck of dust in these people’s lives. Maybe I truly am just a dumb freshman, but the people who sat around me in the TCT classroom mean everything to me. They might not know it, and now I may never get the chance to tell them, but they are the people I aspire to be. 

From the gift of words that they all share to genuine warmth that surrounds them, they have forever left their mark on my life. 

So I cry not because I will never return to the famous TCT classroom, but because I know it will never be the same without the beautiful souls that I never got to say goodbye to.