the best four years of my life officially ended on sunday. mary e. lyons shook my hand and handed me a (fake) diploma. we celebrated our college degrees with cake and pizza and margaritas, reminders of just how proud we should be.
i am proud, and blessed, and excited. even still, i spent the majority of the weekend dragging my (very tall, very cute) heels (with aquamarine toes peeking through), trying to slow down time, coming up with alternatives to graduating and transitioning out of college because it all went too fast and we just need more time:
we can cancel our futures and move into a beach house together for endless sleepovers and snuggling
we can finish finals and have a mandatory hang-out semester, with a dramatic decrease in tuition and lots of volleyball
we can avoid the countdown, ignore the looming goodbyes and just pretend that everything will stay the same forever
or, we can graduate. because did you know you can't stop time? ...something about physics and scientific constants and nonsense that i somehow missed between lectures on tupac and social construction. and i always hated that cliche: "the best four years of your life..." they said it over and over again freshman year as if it became more true with each repetition; every time, i would think back to maher 311: four very different girls living in one very small space, crying tears of homesickness and loneliness, missing family and friends and the ease of high school weekends.
no matter how many times you said it, no matter how many variations it took, it could never come true...
...until it did.
i could spend hours and hours telling stories of how friendships formed and community shaped and trips/retreats changed my life and friends became family and san diego became home and home became a place that couldn't quite fit me anymore. i could write a million blogs to explain why college was actually all that everyone said it would be, to try to do justice to four very full, exciting, hilarious, difficult, real, beautiful years of my life. i could try to explain the profound heartbreak of friends packing boxes and pushing bags into too-small trunks heading north or the feeling of hanging my graduation gown and cords in the back of my closet, or clearing my dining room table of finals review sheets only to be replaced by applications to graduate school and LSAT study guides and professor recommendations. but i'm not sure that there are enough words so that you can understand or that the internet can hold my billions of sentences.
so i will say, in minutes or less, that time went quickly. i'm not exactly sure how we got here so fast. i came to san diego a little girl. i guess i'm a grown-up now. a grown-up saying goodbye to four incredible years and all that they held. life doesn't slow down so that i can dwell on (very) tearful goodbyes or final drives away from campus...dwell as i might, life keeps moving in the only direction it knows. forward. how wonderful that i can say with ninety-four percent certainty (and two percent fear and four percent hope) that the best is yet to come and i will handle the future in a way that only four years at USD could have taught me to do.
starting with: jamaica (round three) on sunday. stories to come :)
