A few nights ago, my three closest friends in my grade and I climbed the spiral staircase of the Walsh-Ellet roof at the university in Sewanee. We laid in a line on the warm, hard concrete, and as The Lumineers softly played, we stared at the stars. I saw the first shooting star, and almost blew my friends’ hearing out by my excited scream. I forced my friends to stare at the sky as long as it took for us all to see the same one. When it finally happened and we all let out an, “Ooh there it is.”

When I got home that night, I felt an overwhelming amount of sadness. I cried in my bed for what felt like ever. However, Caroline texted me and told me that she as well had felt the same sadness and had cried on her way home. It wasn’t until then, that I realized what my sadness was for. That night had started the beginning of the end.

This year is the year of lasts. Last soccer games, last exams, last moments, last chapel services, last time singing, “God be with you till we meet again.” Senior year has always been the year I longed for. I’ve always been waiting for the day that I leave my hometown for college and don’t look back. Lately however, I have felt a sense of fear rush over me. It is not necessarily a fear of leaving my hometown, Sewanee, because I am so sure of how ready I am to venture out and discover new places with new people. But my friends and my family have always been the center of my life. I wouldn’t be half the person I am today if I hadn’t had them in my life and been influenced and inspired in so many ways. Therefore, the idea of leaving these people behind makes my heart drop down to the floor.

Goodbye is my least favorite word. There is so much anxiety, sadness, and anger that wells up inside me when I hear that word. Do not say goodbye. I know I will never lose the friends that I have whom I know I am meant to know and love forever. Yet still the word goodbye lingers over this year like the Sewanee fog that will not lift. I know a goodbye is waiting for me in May, 2017. A goodbye to the town I have lived in for seventeen years, a goodbye to the school who allowed be to fully grow into who I am today. And it is a goodbye to my school class and all my other friends and to my teachers, who have taught me not only about Columbus sailing the ocean blue, but about love, maturity, and compassion.

I could never forget my friends and my expierences in high school, not even the ones I sometimes wish to forget. Yet there remains that lingering thought of having to say goodbye soon. It truly is the beginning of the end.

“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting.” - Peter Pan