The end.

December 8th, 2010.

Classes ended today.

I'm really excited about that! My life is coming back to me.

But this time in the semester always brings me sadness along with the relief. An end has come. I won't ever be in those classes again. More importantly, I probably won't see all of those people anymore. I won't see most of my professors on a regular basis, if ever, anymore. Most of my classmates will become people that I might pass in the hallway from time to time, but that's it. We won't work together ever again, we won't sit together from that point on.

Even though I'm the kind of person who doesn't really know most of the people she has class with everyday, this ending still makes me pause and almost start to grieve. It's when the semester comes to a close that I start to wish that I had reached out to people more. I should have been talking to everyone during the semester, because now our time together is over, and I don't have another chance. When the end of the semester comes, I always feel like we should all stop and give each other a proper farewell, at the very least. Ideally, everyone should promise to keep in touch, make sure they find each other on Facebook, and distribute hugs amongst the group. I mean, we've spent an entire 14 weeks together, in the same environment, learning the same things, taking the same tests, dealing with that same frustrations. That means something. A lot of something. We can't just walk out and not acknowledge it.

But so much of the time, we do. Class ends, we rush out the door, and with that, people we've been living our lives with for three and a half months are things of the past, never to be seen again.

So, even though I've been looking forward to it, I'm having a bit of a hard time being happy about classes being over. I suppose I'll get over it, but there are some people I had class with my freshman year whom I have not seen since, and I still feel a bit of sadness that our lives are not interconnected anymore, or that we didn't even properly acknowledge our inevitable separation before it happened.

There are few endings in life that are quite as final as the ending of school. I think that's why I have a hard time with it. Most things that end in life just fade. I don't know ahead of time that they're going to end, it just kind of happens over time. So I'm not hit with the force of the same impending finality.

And in May, I graduate.....