On Graduating From Something You Love
Hello, soon-to-be-has-been! Look at you, standing at the edge of a moment that feels too big and too small at once, unsure whether to jump, run, fake COVID again, cry, or politely ask time to pause because your friends are still mid-sentence. You're graduating. Or more accurately, you’re being gently but firmly removed from the premises of your youth. Congratulations!
We trudged along for four years—tripping over ourselves and each other—and now suddenly, we’re here with a month left to go. This is the first time in my life time has moved too fast—and something tells me it won’t be the last. Time’s got plans. She’s booked and busy. She’s not stopping for my little memory montage.
I have been experiencing dreams lately where I get faced with the lovechild of all my worst fears. Where I run into my childhood fear of abandonment at a Wayland basement party, and it's making out with my imposter syndrome. They both wave at me. “See you soon!” they say. Then they vanish into a fog of Microsoft Teams notifications and lukewarm ING coffee.
This morning’s nightmare came bearing gifts: an unfamiliar knot in my chest. It tugged at all my organs, “Please feel all your emotions now, even the ones from 2019.” So here I am. Writing this with the shaky resolve of someone who just made eye contact with their own reflection for too long. Fueled by the blue room granola bowl and what I think is self-preservation, I come to this blank google doc.
So, what’s ending, I ask myself:
The living together, the proximity to each other, the barging into each other's rooms, homes, bathrooms et al. unannounced at all hours of the day.
This odd, beautiful chapter where we belonged to each other by proximity, by shared dysfunction, by default.
Where love didn't always need to be announced. It just showed up. Uninvited, yes, but also unmistakably kind. To Abhinaya performances, poster presentations, Barsaat/Harmo archsings, SOTG plays, TAPS speeches —we showed up. We were front row not because we had to be, but because we wanted to be. Because being each other’s biggest cheerleaders felt like second nature. Like breathing. We rooted for each other with the kind of reckless, earnest loyalty that only comes when you’ve seen someone on the hard nights, sat with them while they try to hold it together.
Where people saw you before you saw yourself. They intuited your sadness before you learned its name. Not because they understood who you were, but because they understood who you were becoming. They saw the version of you still buffering. The version you hadn’t digested yet, emotionally or otherwise. They saw you cry in a stained hoodie and still trusted you’d do great things. They knew you not just for the polished bite-sized version you’ve curated for public consumption, but for the half-written draft versions. No pressure for you to label a feeling before they empathize with it, because they just get it.
It’s the kind of knowledge that doesn’t rush you toward coherence. It doesn’t ask you to have a thesis statement. It just holds you in your unfolding.
What’s ending is the version of ourselves that only existed in this moment, in this context, with these people. But what we’ve created together—whatever it is, messy and unfinished and completely ours—it doesn’t vanish. We have brought something into endless existence that will stay with us even when the rest disintegrates. A deeply felt sense of you had to be there. And we were. We were there. That’s what makes the knot in my chest turn into a soft ball of light.
How incredibly lucky am I to be getting in at the ground floor. To have known you before you all built more of yourselves and expanded further into who you are. I got to see the smelly compost heap from which all this future brilliance will sprout. The early drafts. The prequels. The beta versions of your glow-ups. Before we all get better pants and stronger ideas of who we are.
This is not the end.
To all my friends reading this- please linger in this last month. Linger at the door. Take twenty extra minutes to say goodnight. Take a little longer to go to sleep, laugh at the same things again. Let's re-watch something we already quoted to death. Let's fray the edges of this ending (that is not even an absolute ending).
And sure, we’re all about to go off and do Big Serious Adult Things™. Some of us will join consulting firms where we will leverage business words synergistically. Others will write novels, or chase dreams, or move to new and exciting cities. We’ll get tax brackets. Health insurance. Fridges that are fungus and odor free.
But no matter how professionally intimidating or emotionally stable (unlikely) we may one day become, we will alway be kids together. So go ahead. Become yourself. Expand into your career, your life, your third and fourth and fifth personality shift. Just know—somewhere in the world, someone still remembers you at your dumbest, kindest, softest, most chaotic. And they love you for it.
Finally, Please pick up when I call you, After. Please call me even when you don’t know what to say. Please call me even if it’s been too long, and please know that for you, there is no such thing as too long. If there’s small talk, let it be unbearably long. If you’re thinking of me, tell me.
Ask too much of me. I want you to.
This is not the end.
Love,
Kritika
