Fading

“With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked... it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”

I know I'm the only non-English professor in the world who likes Virginia Woolf, but I've been thinking a lot lately about To The Lighthouse and its focus on nostalgia and ways to remember the past that are constructive rather than depressing. Seven weeks from today we graduate, and I won't be in college anymore. Every day I see people whom I will probably never see again after May. I won't belong to this beautiful campus anymore; I'll miss walking into a Wake Forest building whose floors are strewn with flower petals the wind has blown in. I'll never walk through Tribble and Benson again and know everyone I meet. I'll probably never live somewhere that church bells play Disney music at five o'clock every day.

I hate to admit this, because Troy is a terrible, terrible movie (that I love in spite of myself), but Brad Pitt has a point when he says that the transience of human life is more valuable than the stasis of immortality. Wake Forest will always have my heart, but it won't be my home anymore, which means I'll treasure my time here all the more. The best thing to do with the next seven weeks is make memories and maintain friendships that will last longer than anything I've learned in class, longer than I'll have any kind of lingering presence on campus, longer than anyone here will remember me. It's not that I don't want to go; it's time to move on. I can already see the images around me fading as we all plan to disperse. I'm committed to hanging onto the memories forever.