Goodbye and Good Luck

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay."

When I was in ninth grade, we had to write a class poem. I thought it was dumb, and I still sort of think it's dumb. My teacher was a first year who had to be explained by a room of 14-year-olds that Georgia was indeed a country and the New York Times was a newspaper. She presented us with a poem by Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and had us write a poem, "There Had to Be a Last Time," and even though I found the assignment a little juvenile, it holds a bit of truth, there is always a last time, nothing gold can stay.

I write to you for the last time from the Honors Complex here at the University of Akron. I am sitting here in my empty echoey room blasting music for the last time. I spent my last night on the floor of my friends room sleeping in my jeans. We all didn't want to go back to rooms with half of the belongings gone. So we slept like sardines on a mattress on the floor.

I've spent this whole week a little sad, and mad, and everything in between. It's weird, because I usually don't do feelings openly, but lately I've wanted to. I had a bit of a freak out. Like hysterical laughing, monotone talking, pouring out feelings breakdown, and honestly I don't remember half of it. I feel a little bad about it because I vented on someone who was sort of studying, but she was there, and she was an incredibly good listener. I never do this, but sometimes things happen, and they're aren't as mind wrecking as a singular problem, but they just keep spiraling into everything else and they just won't stop. I don't think I've ever been like that, ever. But I've learned I need to face my problems, and a very wise friend told me if you find someone you want to keep around, you don't let them go. These people that I've met here, I have to work at it, because I can't let them go.

So sometimes you have to feel. I'm not used to these manic, overwhelming feelings. I don't really do them and and I feel like I have been on overload. I walk around carrying these thoughts, and worrying about things, and thinking they don't matter, but I care because they do matter, because I am lucky enough to have something to lose.

I feel sort of stupid getting sentimental about this. I'm not graduating, I'm not leaving, I will still be at the same school with the same people, but something about this feels final. I know that I will still see everyone, but I won't be living with them. I can't walk down the hall and ask a question or hang out whenever. I won't be able to run into someone's room to rant about something completely unimportant, and they won't be able to do that to me. I won't walk the campus at night or fall asleep to the mumbles of my sleep talking roommate. We will all separate and see each other in passing, because everyone is always so busy. So although nothing is changing, everything is.

I feel like I don't tell people how I feel enough. Like I need to tell people I love them, that I appreciate them because there is only so much time to do it. And like I said before, no one is dying, we will all still exist, but the way things are now will never be the same again. I started off the year thinking I was the greenest most logic driven person ever, and now I just want to hug everyone.

I've always found it funny that every year when my birthday comes around I get the question, "Feel any different being [blank] age?", and every year I answer with a no, because change doesn't happen all at once, it happens gradually, and before you know it everything is different. My little sister is graduating high school this year. It feels like a lifetime since that was me, but in reality we are only 2 years apart. The person I was at seventeen was radically different than who I am now. But, me, I'm not anything original, I am a sum of everyone I've known. My differences now were shaped by all of the people I've spent the last 2 years with, for good and for bad.

But here's to the future. We are here now, and everything that changes will quickly become the norm and these memories will just be pictures inside our heads, and sounds we can't quite remember. But we can look back one day and tell these stories to our grandchildren. We can look with love.

I wish you all the luck in your future endeavors, and although the possibility of losing touch looms in the air, I hope to be there for every single one of them.

Noelle