To my senior year of college,
It feels a bit early to be writing this letter now. Sure, I only have three more days of classes, but there’s still three weeks until graduation — I’m doing my best not to count the days. Nevertheless, all good things must come to an end, including this series of letters that I started in my hometown freshman year because of COVID-19. I have been writing for HerCampus since my first days on campus at BU, and I love that these articles have become a collection of memories to look back on.
All year, I’ve kept coming back to the cliché phrase: “If you told me four years ago this is where I’d be now, I wouldn’t have believed you.” I do think there’s some truth to that — four years ago I certainly wouldn’t have been able to guess where I’d be now, but I also don’t think I would be surprised at all.
So many wonderful things have happened this year: I made new friends and grew closer with the ones who have been here with me throughout the whole journey (you know who you are, and I love you guys more than anything). I’ve been to more concerts than I can count. I spent my 22nd birthday on campus surrounded by friends from all parts of my life. I finally got a campus job. I finally took a creative writing class, something I’ve been waiting to fit into my schedule for four years. I went on a spring break adventure to New Orleans with my best friends. I watched our hockey team win the conference championship game. I celebrated Marathon Monday properly for the first — and the last — time. I decided to take a little detour along my career path, and I’m excited to see the meaningful impact I’m going to make at my new job. I’m moving to a city that I’ve never been to before, and I can’t wait to explore it. I’ve learned about love and compromise and living in the moment and being ready to move forward, even when I’m not actually ready. This year has been a wonderful, beautiful rollercoaster ride, and I am grateful for every minute of it.
I wrote a poem recently in that creative writing class about moving to a new city, and there’s a few lines from it that I want to share in this letter too:
I have never been to this city
Before and I might only be
There for two years or
I might stay there for the rest of my life and
I think it’s kind of lovely that I don’t
Know anything, really.
To me, those last two lines are what surprise me most regarding where I’ve ended up after these past four years. Change used to be the scariest thing in the world to me, even when it was something I wanted for myself. I can’t say I’m not still scared to move to a new city alone, but I can also confidently say that I am ready for it. I don’t know what’s waiting for me ahead, but I’m excited to go find out.
I am still not ready to go, but I am also trying to tell myself that that’s the best way to leave something behind. It’s better to leave behind the best memories on a high than to exhaust them to the point where I can’t wait to get out of here. While I think I’ll forever blame Covid for making me feel like I missed out on a piece of what my college experience should have been, I am also a big believer that everything happens for a reason. Instead, I’ll remind myself that all of the messiness of the past four years has allowed me to, as Taylor Swift once wrote, “arrive so wondrously and brutally, by design or some violent, exquisite happenstance, here.”
They say that college is the best four years of your life, but I would much rather believe that it’s just the best four years of my life so far. We now go onward and upward, and I will carry the love I’ve found at BU with me for the rest of my life.
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