Right before starting university, I was sitting in school having the absolute time of my life with my friends. We weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. We were sitting right next to each other like we always did, talking and laughing about something completely ridiculous. But right in the middle of all of it, this heavy, suffocating realization washed over me out of nowhere: I am going to miss this exact moment so much it hurts.
 When you’re with the same people day in and day out, you get so used to the constant, messy rhythm of it all that you take it for granted. But as you get closer to entering a new chapter of your life, reality sets in. Soon, the dynamics won’t be the same, everyone will go their separate ways, and suddenly we’re all not experiencing the same things together. I felt this desperate urge to mentally glue myself to the chair, stop time, and treasure the second I was in, precisely because I knew the clock was ticking. I was actively mourning the exact moment I was currently sitting in.
Andy said it best in the series finale of The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”. But nobody ever warns you about what happens when you do know, when you’re hyper-aware that you’re in the good old days while they’re actively happening. There is a reason Taylor Swift’s song, “Never grow up” hits so hard to those who actually listen to the lyrics. You know those scenes where the main character is just lying on the floor, and every ordinary conversation feels incredibly heavy because the audience knows an ending is right around the corner? That is exactly what it feels like. You become the main character of a movie that is getting dangerously close to the credits.Â
When this anticipatory nostalgia hits, our immediate reflex is to reach for our phones and capture the moment. We take a picture or record a chaotic video of our friends dying of laughter, desperately hoping we can freeze time for our camera rolls. But honestly, trying to aggressively archive the moment usually just rips you right out of it. It’s a thin line between wanting to permanently bottle up a feeling and knowing that sometimes, you just need to put the screen down and surrender to the present.Â
This heavy ache isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The sheer intensity of sadness you feel while still in the moment is a massive flex in and of itself. It is the ultimate proof of how much you love the people around you. It means you have something so good that your heart is breaking a little in advance. If we could stay in those ordinary comfortable days forever, they wouldn’t feel so special, the fact that it ends is exactly what gives it value. While it is beautiful to mourn the end of an era, you cannot let the grief blind you to the beginning of a new one. We spend so much energy trying to hold onto the present that we forget that the future is going to have magic of its own too. When you finally enter that new chapter of your life, the dynamics will be different but that doesn’t mean worse. You’re going to sit in new rooms, meet new people and laugh over entirely different inside jokes, and one day you’ll look around and find yourself pre-mourning those moments too.Â
So, as much as it hurts to watch a perfect chapter end, the next one deserves you completely. Let it hurt, and then let it go. You still have so many good old days left to meet.