My Final Act of Love

Someone in my batch said it first, I think. Or maybe everyone said it at the same time, in different corners of campus, in the last week before we left. “My final act of love is feeding the ducks near Schezorian Point.” (I’ve been here 4 years, and I’m still not sure I’m spelling it right). And just like that, a phrase so gentle, so devastating passed through me like a current. 

We say “final act” as if love has a curtain call. Like we can simply wrap it up, hand it back to the place that made us, and just walk away. But what I’ve learned in the week since we’ve all gone back is that there is nothing clean about this. The final act of love is not final. It is, at best, the first stage of grief.

There’s something about Krea, specifically, I think, that makes this that much harder. The campus seeps into you. The way the light falls differently by the lake in the evening. The silence around the library building at around 2 am. The ducks at Schezorian Point who have, despite all evidence to the contrary, survived four years of undergraduates offering them everything from rice to existential crises.

Your empty room is just one of the many other things that haunt you. Standing in the doorway of your empty room is something no one (and somehow everyone, at the same time) warns you about. Everything’s gone without a trace. It isn’t goodbye, though. It’s the first moment you truly understand just what you’re saying goodbye to. You take one last hard look. You call it love. Then you close the door and leave, but the thought of it just…stays.

That is the thing no one warns you about. The final act doesn’t close anything. It opens you. We perform these rituals because we are conditioned to believe that love can be completed. That if we just do this one last thing, we will have honoured it properly, and it’ll let us go. But it doesn’t let you go. You carry it. You carry it onto the cab, onto the train, into the next city where nothing smells right, and the sky is the wrong colour, and you catch yourself weirdly missing a specific duck. 

But maybe that’s the most honest thing about leaving. That you feel it before it’s over. That the ache starts when you’re actually still there. When the room is still yours, and the ducks still come to you because they’ve learned that the students bring them food. The ending isn’t a moment. It’s a season. And you feel it before you even know it’s begun. 

So yes. Feed the ducks. Stand in the doorway. Take the long route to JSW one last time. Do all of it, and mean it. But know that the word final is a lie you’re telling yourself. What you’re really doing is learning how to carry the place in everything you will do, and everything you will become. The love doesn’t go away; it finds this quieter place within you and stays there. And, years from now, on a random Tuesday in a city far from home, something will catch the light in a certain way that you thought only happened here, and you will be briefly, completely back. 

The final act of love is not where it ends. It’s where the missing begins. And the missing, as it turns out, is simply love with nowhere left to go. 

Written by a Krea University senior, somewhere between campus and wherever comes next. :)

• 2026 grad
• college
• graduation
• Krea University
• love
• senior year
• university