For my final blog post of the year, I wasn’t sure what to write about. Girls aired an amazing two-part finale to a great fifth season last night, so I could write about that, a sort of check-in since my last post about it. I could write about the finales of Better Call Saul or Shameless, or the second Story Slam I went to, or any other arts-related thing I’ve been to on campus.
But I most want to write about goodbyes, and friendship, and closure, and the high school I went to that’s closing in 2019.
A lot of my friends and former teachers have posted things about what Harrison High School meant to them and why they’re so sad about it, and at first, it seemed a little odd to me. Justified, maybe, but there are three more years before the school will actually close—it seems weird to be reading things like “I’ll miss you, Harrison,” like it’s already all over. There are a few more years! We’ll still be able to visit! It’s not closing tomorrow!
But, of course, one of the things that sucks about endings like this is that you have to create your own ending. Maybe there will be some day down the line, in 2019, when there’ll be a Harrison closing party, and everyone will come back to Farmington and catch up and reminisce and be sad together. But we can’t wait for three years to start the grieving process. Everything is set in stone now.
It’s easy to argue for why Harrison shouldn’t be closed, or to name the specific qualities that make it great. Aside from the football team and the IB program, there’s a diversity at Harrison that just doesn’t exist at other schools in the area. Really, though, I’m not one of the most qualified people to argue for why Harrison—the building, the school—is objectively a great school. All I can tell you is what my very subjective, personal perspective is, having been a student there at four years.
High school is kind of where I became a person—at least, the person I am now. Sometime around 2012, I kind of hit on something and started liking myself more than I was used to. Before that, I’d considered myself a pessimist. Seeing the world as full of douchebags and evil people somehow seemed hip and fun to me, and being a consistent user of sarcasm, I thought I was supposed to self-identify as a pessimist. Then I kind of realized being happy and being sarcastic weren’t mutually exclusive, and I started looking at everything more positively, and I stopped worrying about at least a handful of my insecurities, and I started accepting sometimes that what would happen would happen, and I went into my senior year at my peak.
I still sometimes think of my senior year of high school as my peak, even after three pretty good years of college. There was just something so beautiful about senior year, about facing the gaping hole of the future and not knowing exactly what it would be like but being excited for it. There was something so bittersweet, so oddly beautiful in its somberness, about hanging out with my friends and having fun but knowing that it was almost over. I had more friends than I ever had, and I was more confident than ever. I genuinely liked spending time with myself.
Remembering my senior year of high school reminds me that as much as college has helped me become a smarter, more open-minded person, it’s not where my personality was formed. College may have given me new experiences and pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’m really happy with how it’s gone, but high school is where I had the most years of actual change.
And it’s hard to think of a life before high school. There were 14 years of my life before, and I have a ton of memories from then, but somehow I’m unable to conceive of myself as a real person with real experiences before then. Facing the void at the end of 12th grade wasn’t terrifying just because of college; it was terrifying because it felt like I was leaving my own life entirely.
So when I think about Harrison closing, that’s what I’m most sad about. The place where I became a person who I actually liked is not going to exist. And no matter how happy I am now, no matter how grateful I am that I got to experience Harrison while it was still there, the fact that it’s closing kind of sucks.
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There’s a curious thing that happens when some sort of end is approaching: everything leading up to the end seems to happen specifically to provide you with a sense of closure. Conceiving of an ending as a sort of real-life TV season finale has been written about ad nauseam, by myself, by my fabulous friend Chloe Gilke, and by anyone who consumes much too pop culture. It’s a classic case of life seeming to imitate art.
I’m at the end of my junior year of college, which makes next year my last year. That’s really terrifying, and I kind of hate talking or thinking about it for a variety of reasons. For one, I still kind of feel like I’m 17 years old, completely dependent on adults who know more than me and unable to live on my own or do my taxes or think seriously about a career. Another weirdly big thing: I’ve made a bunch of new friends at The Michigan Daily who are all freshmen and sophomores, so it’s deeply sad to me that they’ll have at least one or two more years there without me. It’s like I’m facing a two-year case of FOMO between the time when I’m done at the Daily and the time when most of my friends are.
But, for now, the end of the school year isn’t a culmination of my whole college experience; it’s more just a culmination of the year I’m finishing. And several of my interactions with people have already seemed perfectly fitting with a season finale-esque ending. There’s been one big, cathartic drunken sharing of previously unspoken feelings. One pleasant agreement that a friend and I wanted to rekindle our dormant friendship next year. One final fiction reading my friend gave, which showed me how far she’d come since we first met in our creative writing class two years ago, and which somehow seemed a fitting last time to see her before she moves to Chicago.
Today I hung out with a bunch of Daily friends and luxuriated in the warm temperatures. At around 7:00, it was perfect out; the sun was beginning to set as a casual concert happened on the diag. It was my friend Melina’s last night in Ann Arbor until the fall, but my friend Karen is graduating and leaving in a week, so Melina and Karen had an emotional goodbye.
I got into a conversation with Karen about how, for all we knew, once all of us eventually left school, many of us would never see each other again in our lives. Sure, we’d all love to see each other again down the road, but many of us aren’t from Michigan to begin with, so we wouldn’t have much motivation to fly back. And life and jobs and relationships all get in the way of casual reunions.
I’m personally not that concerned about it because being mostly English, film, and communications majors, my friends at the Daily are mostly heading into similar fields. I know we’ll end up running into one another at weird times in the future, and maybe contacting each other to network and get new job opportunities. Many of us will probably end up in New York City or Los Angeles.
I talked to my friend Julie about all this, and she brought up high school. She said something that I’ve heard from a lot of my friends: leaving high school made them realize how little they really cared about keeping most high school friends in their lives.
I can understand that. I’ve experienced it a little. I think back to some of my friends I considered great friends in high school and feel no serious need to reconnect with them now. I mean, like, it’d be nice if I ran into them, but I only really think about many of them once in a while, if I’m in a particularly nostalgic mood. Most of the time, I’m focused on the people who are still in my life.
But the real reason I’m comfortable with where I am right now with most of my high school friends isn’t that I don’t really miss them. I do miss them! Even the ones I don’t actively think about I wish I could see again. Sometimes I fantasize about high school reunions when we’ll all reunite and reminisce.
It’s amazing to think about the fact that when college first started, I had a schedule to contact high school friends, some sort of systematic way of keeping up with them. I assigned people to different groups based on how often I ‘had to’ talk to them. Of course, it inevitably failed, and I don’t know how I thought it could actually succeed. But my happy surprise is that it’s unnecessary to talk to someone every single day or every week or every month or even every year to still feel love and closeness with them. It can wait.
When I hung out with my high school friend Allison last winter break, I wasn’t sure when I’d see her next. When she dropped me back off at home, I could’ve said, “Okay, I’ll see you over spring break, maybe?” or “Are you ever planning on visiting Ann Arbor?” or “Maybe I’ll see you in the summer, if our schedules overlap.” But I didn’t say any of those things, because I understood that none of that was necessary. I just said, “I’ll see you when I see you.”
So yeah, I’ll miss Harrison High School. Yeah, I’ll miss Karen when she leaves, and my creative writing friend Holly, and Chloe. And a year from now, when I graduate from college, when I do say goodbye to all of these great people in my life, it’ll inevitably be sad, because it’ll mean seeing them a lot less often than I did before.
But I also know it’s not over. It never really is.
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