Farewell Moments

Dear me;
Don't worry about how many yearbook signatures you get. If you get a hundred, fantastic. If you get zero, wonderful. If you get anything in between, that's perfectly fine, too. But, really, it's not about lines that someone scribbles on a page in a book you'll forget about in ten years. What matters are the moments that someone shapes in your life. These are the things you'll carry with you. So instead of immortalizing signatures, I want to imprint on you these moments. I don't want your feeble memory to lose its grasp, and I can't trust it to hold on indefinitely.

One;
A friend of mine recently suffered an injury at the hands of a machine, in which her hair got sucked into a fan and caused hair loss, damage to her scalp, and a minor concussion. This accident occurred on a Friday, and she was out of school for a few days, returning on Wednesday afternoon and easing herself into the schedule of presentations. We got a fifteen-minute break to go outside, walk around, get some fresh air, and I was initially going to go with another friend to adventure to the xeriscaped courtyard-garden behind the science building, but my injured friend couldn't walk very far distances or very quickly due to the minor concussion. So she and I meandered around the grass, searching for the owlets and otherwise leisurely walking around across from the library. It was quietly memorable because it seemed so normal and natural, but tender at the same time. Also, the dynamic was very different than when someone had run up to her and given her a hug when she saw her and others chattered away about what had happened while she was gone. My relationship with her is a lot different. Initially I was upset with myself for being aloof when she arrived, but our short perambulation reminded me that this is where the value in our friendship lies.

Two;
At the all-school awards ceremony on Thursday, the headmaster listed the several teachers that would be retiring after the completion of the current academic year, and I was surprised to hear the name of my United States history teacher from junior year. Once we were dismissed and everyone was leaving the gym, I saw my former teacher sitting a few rows behind where I had been seated. I approached him, and he smiled his crooked smile and stood up. We shook hands and I congratulated him on his retirement, admitting how sad I was that he would be leaving, but he assured me that he would still be involved with the school as the football coach. We seemed to shake hands for a lot longer than was typical before releasing our grasp. He asked me where I had decided to go to college, and after remarking on Middlebury's academic reputation, he mused about my going to "the wilds of New England." He congratulated me, and I congratulated him again before I continued on my way. I was glad to have had the opportunity to talk to him, because he was my favorite teacher from junior year, and in asking him to write a recommendation for me, he has been more involved in my college search than any other professor of mine. Also, I had bade farewell to a retiring former teacher at the end of junior year, and it was nice to be able to do that again, especially since I'm moving on to new journeys in my life as well.

Three;
I did a lot of gazing out the window during presentations on Thursday, and a patch of daisies underneath a cottonwood caught my eye. I didn't have my camera, and we had to go to the awards ceremony, so I reminded myself to head back down to the library after school to take pictures. As I walked across the football field and the track, I snapped some photos of the sky, the clouds, and the trees, and when I ducked around to the side of the library, something in me ached. I felt some reflexive expression from this quotation: "I hurt.... It's a good hurt, though, the wonderful, beautiful hurt called love where your heart breaks in a second and is mended a million times over in the next, where an internal flame scalds you thoroughly from the inside out and then washes you clean of the burns instantly." I walked through the thick grass littered with tree debris and weeds, marveling at the tall flowers as they stretched up proudly and drank in the sun. This was a corner of the library I had walked by a few times but wasn't particularly familiar with. It felt secluded, yet the simple, natural beauty emanating from it overwhelmed me. I identified with that quotation because, all of a sudden, a nostalgia had come over me. Even though I hadn't visited the niche before, a yearning filled me, a yearning to not leave yet because I still had more to see, to discover, to explore, to cherish. I recognized and embraced my whole-bodied connection to nature and the Earth in those moments.