Thinking back on my approximate 1386 days that I’ve spent being a student at South, I think of the memories, laughs and many long nights of studying, no matter if it was in-person or face-to-face. I think of all the familiar faces I’ve met and the memories I’ve made with them. True comprehension that I would be leaving all of these behind didn’t actually dawn on me until just recently.

I will be leaving behind things like the back of the Tower room, where some of my fondest memories at South were made. I’ll also be leaving behind the many friends I made during high school, and as time goes on my memory of these people will most likely slip away. I’ll undoubtedly recognize a classmate just as my mom does when she is grocery shopping and slips away to effortlessly talk to someone she hasn’t seen or spoken to in 20 years about things that happened 22 or 23 years prior.

But with the prospect of leaving my high school days behind, I get a combination of two feelings. I’m obviously going to miss all of the things that I have talked about previously, but I also get a feeling of excitement for the future. I know that eventually, I’m going to look back on these days when I’m fully acclimated to college and laugh at a simpler time.

To any freshmen or underclassmen reading this, I want you to know that even though it sounds cliche, and you probably hear it every day, your high school days really do fly by fast. As the song “Time” by Pink Floyd so well states, “You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun”, the time has a tendency to fly by and get behind you. For me, it really didn’t hit me until the second semester of this year started that I would be leaving all this behind in a few short months.