It's Not Just Four Years

At the end of this August, I packed up my car for the fourth and final trip to Elon. Of those four times, it was the first that I’d found myself in tears. I looked at my family in the rear view mirror, and was shocked to find myself unable to keep my tears at bay. For the first time since starting college, I didn’t want to leave home.

Going to school freshman, sophomore and junior year, I was always excited. Sure, I was nervous my freshman year, but I couldn’t wait to see what Elon had in store for me. At the end of that year, I looked out the window of my dad’s car and cried the entire way back to Baltimore, unable to fathom the thought of not living in West for the next three months. I still maintain that the first day back at Elon my sophomore year was one of the best days of my life—there isn’t quite any feeling like reuniting with best friends. After being abroad my first semester of junior year, the feeling of pulling into my new apartment that spring was unparalleled—an entire semester apart made coming back that much better.

There was something about coming back to Elon for senior year, however, that felt different.

It’s not just the cliché  “this is our last year” feeling that separates senior year either, even though that is definitely a part of it. The nostalgia seems a constant presence with every walk to class and activity we do–our last first day of classes, our final fall convocation, our last fall concert. It’s almost like we have to soak it all in before it’s taken away. Over the last four years, Elon has become a second home and our lives here have become routine. Whether it’s a tour group watching us as we work out in the gym, the occasional stumbling  over a missing brick on our way to class, or raiding our roommate’s closet for an outfit for a night out, we know this place. We know what to expect, day in and day out. But come the day after Graduation, and we won’t know a single thing.

For our entire lives, our future has been laid out in front of us. From elementary school to middle school, from middle school to high school, from high school to college we’ve always known what comes next. Going from high school to college was scary and unpredictable but we had a path that we were following. Now, for the first time in our entire lives our future is uncertain. We might be living in an entirely new city with complete strangers, all while trying to learn how to handle  a real job and meet expectations that are higher than ever before. I think that’s why I was so upset to leave home this year, because for once, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever spend another summer there again.

The uncertainty of our future after graduation breeds a fear that we aren’t quite sure how to grapple with yet, and we may not reach that understanding until our new lives become our new routines, until they become our new Elon.