It’s a beautiful day outside and I have three days left out of my first year of university. I went shopping yesterday and still have all the bags lying around behind me sprawled across my bed and floor. I haven’t removed them from the bags because I’ll just be repacking them shortly anyway.
I was the first person to start packing almost four weeks ago with everyone asking why I was starting so soon. And now, everyone else around me has pretty much cleared their rooms and I’m left sitting here in a mess of half-packed clothes and dirty dishes I don’t want to wash.

It’s weird. I’ve been waiting for this day since the weather turned bad in January. Wishing to get out of here and start my summer. And now that it’s here, I find myself torn between familiarity and tradition. It’s like I’m going back to tradition and discarding the familiar. I’m used to living by myself now, in a single room with everything that I do being totally up to me and no one else. Now I’m going back to living with my parents and back to being frustrated that I’m going to actually have to be home at a certain time.
It just gets me thinking about how much things have changed over this past school year. Almost everything they tell you in university prep books and seminars and pamphlets were true. But those same info packets neglected to mention the most important things. They forgot to say that some of the people you meet will remind you of someone you knew in the past, and some of them will remain in your life far into the future. And how the only way people are going to listen to you is if you stand up for yourself and go after what you want. The fact that “nobody stays friends with anyone from high school” is a completely bogus analogy and if it’s true for you, then they really weren’t your friends to begin with.

This past year, choosing to pursue my education was probably the best decision I ever made. Not only because of the obvious benefits for my career, but for the benefits for my life. I’ve learned that the most memorable nights are usually the ones that start off innocently; you can never really move on unless you let go of the past; it’s okay to ask for help, and greatly appreciated when you give it; you can’t trust everyone, no matter how much you want to; it’s those who come and visit you even though you are extremely contagious that are truly your friends; you will always wish that something turned out differently; you’ll realize, for the first time, what it means to miss someone or something; and you’ll see that you really have changed.

This past week, everyone has done something the way they’ve always done it but ended it with a sniff and the sentence “this is the last time we’re going to be doing this”. And I’ll roll my eyes and fake whine with the rest of them, but I guess it’s true. It’s like the ending of high school again. Sure, we’re coming back next year to continue school, but we’re not living here anymore. And not many of us are living together. It’s over – all of it.

This time, we’re actually going to have to grow up. Living in residence wasn’t actually much more than a bunch of teenagers hanging out without parental supervision 24/7. But now, as most of us here are living on our own next year, we have to figure out who to call to get a phone line hooked up, cable installed, internet split up, heating turned on, hydro tracked – they did that all for us here. When we didn’t have heat, we complained to someone who complained to someone else until someone came to fix it. There was always still someone else there when something went wrong. Now, it’s just us. We have to figure everything out when it goes wrong and no one else. I find that kind of scary – but completely liberating at the same time.

It’s weird; for the first time in my whole life, I get to say I start my summer vacation in April. Life is good.