{shortcode-1d5b5687558ae604c714651c44463de533554096}
Dear Senior Year,
Just last week, as I walked along the river at sunset, I had a moment where all I felt for this place was love.
It was no small thing, no fleeting feeling. It was a big, huge love, a totality of adoration. Emotion bubbled up from my abdomen and into my chest — a literal, physical feeling. So much affection for one thing I could hardly breathe.
I still don’t know what to name it, this feeling. Gratitude, maybe, but it felt like more. It felt like a pause, though my feet still moved forward, and the sun still slipped toward the horizon. Tiny movements pulling me through time and inching me closer to the finish line of May 29th. The day that marks the end of you, counterintuitively called “commencement.”
{shortcode-44a53f9042b84364a47ef1c9b7ff53af732a9b1d}
I am wary of what I felt at the river, a feeling I have grown familiar with. It pops up every once in a while, more often now that the word “graduation” floats through the air with each passing day. I worry it is my body telling you, “Please do not let me go.” Revolting against the change your very existence threatens.
But I don’t think that’s it. At least, I hope it’s not. I think the emotion is pure. The truth is that I am unafraid of novelty, that I’m content with what’s to come. I will say goodbye to you, and I will say goodbye to college as a whole, and that will be it.
I will write out my final letter, and I’ll sign it off with my typical, “Yours, Michal,” and that will be the last time it’ll be true, the last time I’ll belong to you enough to say it.
***
I’ve been thinking about this letter for four years. For a while, I thought it’d be the most devastating thing I’d ever write. Dramatic, I know. But the letter I envisioned — one of sadness, longing, and gut-wrenching nostalgia — is not the one I’m writing.
In the same way, the life I envisioned is not the one I’m living. What I expected of college was a normal series of ups and downs, highs and lows. What I did not expect of college was to live the hardest years of my life here.
I did not expect to lose a best friend to mental illness after only a year and a half of knowing them. I did not expect to organize a memorial for a 19-year-old, to write him a eulogy, to go to grief therapy every week and have something to talk about each time. But that’s what I got.
Real life bleeds into the supposed utopia of college, no matter how much we try to stop it from doing so. Mine is not the only life that’s been touched by something greater than I can understand. I’ve seen so many peers go through the unimaginable, then pick themselves up, go to class, and eat their lunch. I’ve seen so much strength go unnoticed.
College has been hard for many of us, but that isn’t all it’s been. It has restored my faith in good friendship, empathetic mentorship, and my own fortitude. If these years have broken me, they’ve also stitched me back up.
{shortcode-7cefc14978722b12548c06f2c44a26f1fa31f2d7}
I find myself choosing recency bias. I am grateful, not dismayed. I think, in the end, we brave the storms of the people and places we love.
***
When I arrived on campus in August, I anticipated a version of you that looked like a repetition of my Harvard life before I went abroad last spring. Same friends, same routines, but more time on my hands. Instead, you’ve been a reinvention of everything I thought I knew.
You introduced me to beautiful people it took me three years to meet and made me wonder what had taken so long. You brought me on weekend trips to Vermont and New Hampshire and Philadelphia and New York. You ran with me through the Samaritans 5K, a fundraiser for suicide prevention, and the Cambridge Half Marathon, to which I wore all blue. You watched me pour my heart and soul into a year-long project I’ve dreamed of since I got here — writing a novel for my thesis — and helped me enjoy the process. You walked by me through many “lasts”: last PAF training, last Harvard-Yale, last Fifteen Minutes writers’ meeting, last ceramics class. You made a finite set of time feel limitless.
{shortcode-3a2ad1482fbda88c1bf3ad534c50c072ab928040}
At moments, I’ve traced your wrinkles of age, manifestations of the way you’ve changed and matured since freshman year. I’ve bemoaned the truth of time’s passing: people grow in different directions, and we don’t always get to keep what we once had.
In turn, life gives us something else to soften the blow — confirmation that the growth is taking us someplace we want to go. Sometimes we are even lucky enough to take old friends along with us, those we see walking the same way.
My best friends now include people I met on the first day of freshman year and people I didn’t meet until this fall. They include those who have chosen me for character and not proximity. Every day I choose them back.
{shortcode-4f95f72f2c4dbc5266c298729106537cf915ae06}
***
I love the life Harvard has given me, not because it’s been perfect, but because it hasn’t been. Freshman year exhilarated me, sophomore year disarmed me, junior year repaired me, and you, senior year, have made me proud.
I look back at my four years and feel grateful for who I was at every stage, at times unsteady and at others strong. I exit Harvard not with less hope, but with much, much more.
At the end of May, I leave behind my sunny Lowell courtyard, four years straight with a roommate I’ve clung to, a walking distance to all my friends, and my two younger sisters, who will continue to take this campus by storm.
But I take with me the love that doesn’t dwindle. That big, huge love — the one I feel in my bones.
Yours, one last time,
Michal
