It seems that at least every other week our editor’s columns focus on how different this year is, how any semblance of our senior year is crumbling, how our sanctuary of Room 139 just isn’t the same—whether we’re actually in the room or not. 

And while this year may be the complete opposite of what I could ever expect for my last year of high school, I think I’m ending it in the same place I started. 

The couch. Today, I am writing this from the couch that watched me grow up, and it almost feels like TCT, at least, is normal. 

Freshman year, the couch watched me sprawl out on the floor in front of it, for I was too nervous to actually sit on it (why I was scared of furniture, I don’t know, but I have anxiety), and sophomore year it held mine and Sarah Wordhouse’s hands as we spilled mandarin oranges and cried over our post-Julia Michaels’ concert depression. 

This couch fit me, Lynlee, Sarah, Reena, and Courtney on its worn cushions, and it let us spill our secrets, and it let us share our words—no judgment. It smiled as Lynlee and I, just fifteen, endlessly distracted Reena, Nish, and Sus, pulling them away from their seemingly “grown-up” editor work, and it wept as we each wept for the seniors’ last days in the room. 

Junior year, especially, it simply held me as I broke under the pressures of being a junior, of being a junior editor, of watching the days in this room wane. 

And senior year, it simply sighed as I sat in a blue plastic chair, isolated from everyone else in the room, just doing the work I had to do for class—nothing more. No spilling oranges, no naps, no squishing five people on the couch that can comfortably sit three. 

But, in the spirit of the true unpredictability of both last year and now this year, I am somehow sitting on this couch again, and while there is no Sarah, or anyone else from our eight-person staff two years ago, there is me. 

I’m still here, with my limited days remaining, and I am just grateful. While not even Lynlee, my best friend in the entire world, is beside me on this couch, our names are next to each other on the plaque above the couch, and our bricks will be soon. 

I tend to complain a lot in these diary-esque entries, but this week, despite the absolute chaos surrounding me, I just feel lucky. Lucky to be back on the couch that started it all.