Graduation and Goodbyes
How to say goodbye
Jason Chang
The melting snow and my ramping senioritis have signaled recently that my undergraduate journey is coming to an end. As I picked up my cap and gown from the bookstore yesterday, the moment felt surreal. It’s hard to picture there’s something beyond this, or that the yearly cycle of classes and finals and summer break will not perpetuate beyond this iteration. And as the end draws ever closer, I am forced to reckon with the fact that I will, once again, have to say goodbye.
I have always struggled with goodbyes. I linger at the airport for one more glance, I pull people in tighter for one more second in their embrace—I clasp my fingers together, trying to will time to slow to a crawl and delay those final sands from falling through for just a moment longer.
In physics, the concept of entropy demonstrates the one-directional arrow of time. With every second, disorder irreversibly rises. Thus, the same molecules in the same states that comprised a moment in time can never be reassembled, uncontrollably flying off as they only ever get further and further away from that magical moment when they briefly interacted to create that instance.
As it turns out, those moments aren’t even safe in your memory. Memories are often incomplete, and even the mere act of recalling a memory, dredging it from the depths of your mind, renders it vulnerable to being changed. So the instant a moment passes, it is truly gone, and you say goodbye to it forever. Neuroscientific studies have shown that these moments of goodbye are comparable to experiencing physical pain, activating many of the same regions in each case. And so over and over, I put it off. I ignore and deny, hoping that final goodbye will never come.
Yet how precious is it that this once, we are granted such a clear end. So often in life things slip away before we realize, leaving us to only mourn its absence after it is already gone. It is truly rare for a goodbye to be expected, to be able to be planned for. That we are granted the privilege to say goodbye, to cleanly close one chapter of our life and start the next—as hard as it is—is a beautiful gift.
When I graduated high school, my senior quote came from A. A. Milne, who wrote, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard?” And now as I come to the close of another chapter, I find it has never been more true. The 8th Floor Middlebrook Movie Lounge where we binged all the Shrek movies and played speed until the morning. The Washington Avenue Bridge we would run to at midnight freshman year to scream our frustrations off the side. The hallways of HSEC that I always joked I spent more time roaming than I spent sleeping, home to countless study sessions and 4AM conversations. Sunsets on the ledge behind Bruininks, the taste of Franks after a long night out, and the beat up leather couch where I had my first kiss. This is a place that I once never thought I’d call home, but now one I can’t imagine leaving.
I am not the same shy, wide-eyed kid who walked into the eighth floor of Middlebrook four years ago. This community that has formed my reality for the past few years has shaped me into the person I am today—one, I’d like to think, that is better. One that I am finally proud of. My mind is filled with memories I’ll never forget and people who will always hold a piece of my heart. My camera roll is flooded with photos and Snapchat clips I’ll never get around to editing into a video. And my desk is littered with trinkets and mementos, each of which elicit a visceral memory, good or bad. So though this is a goodbye, this is not truly the end. I will carry pieces of my time here with me for the rest of my life.
So as I close out these final few weeks of the semester and don my cap and gown, I say thank you for sharing these past four years with me. And thank you for making goodbye so, so hard.