Volume 3

It currently stands at 10:57 a.m., on Friday, May 10th, 2013. Again, I say that because that is how I started off my first and second end-of-the-Stonehill-year blog posts. I am listening to the same piece of Lost music, and sitting in approximately the same spot. The weather is as nice as it was the first two times, as well. There's some kind of symbolism in all of this, I think.

For once, for my last post at Stonehill during the school year, I'm planning on talking about Stonehill itself. One thing that I just thought of was distancing oneself from this place. It would make sense that when you know that the end is near, you would want to start distancing yourself, making the transition seem a little easier. The exact opposite happens here. One car ride home from my third (and final) summer as a Stonehill student will bring me to a summer vacation lasting some 40 hours, before I return Sunday night to begin work in Admissions. Where I'll work throughout the summer. This is what I mean when I say that people don't want to leave this place.

I could write a book about junior year, and everything that's happened between August 20-something and now. But in reality, that book would start before I moved into New Hall for my junior year. It would have started over the summer, when I was a rising junior, and even before that, when I was making plans to live here for said summer of rising junior status. What I'm getting at is that this all goes back to the beginning. As does everything. But we can divide that beginning-to-end into segments, and that's what I've (somewhat) done since my senior year of high school.

My AP Stats teacher, the One Day, One Room-famous Ms. Trenholm, told me at the end of my senior year of high school that college would be just another volume in the Life of Tardiff, or something like that. That high school was its own volume, and so too would college be. So, I went with it. Sometime during my freshman year at Stonehill I created two folders - Volume 1 and Volume 2. The former was filled with a handful of documents from high school - my college application essay, a letter to myself that I wrote in AP Psych, my poems/songs, and the PowerPoint document that I had to represent the points I allotted each person in our friends group. (No seriously, I was like that once. And still am.) Plus a few other things. Same kind of concept for Volume 2. But it really is just more of a concept, instead of an actual "here is my life in a folder on my laptop" kind of thing.

And in thinking about this idea, I've decided to close the book on Volume 2. College has been great and wonderful so far, but I actually feel like I've been here for three years. It doesn't just feel as though time has flown by and senior year is coming up and then graduation. I totally know that all of this is happening, and I'm okay with it. I'll have had my time when it comes and goes. So with this, I end the first three years of Stonehill life, and begin my final with a new volume. What will come of this? I have no idea. You get used to living a certain lifestyle, with certain people in your life, and then those people leave and other people come in and you have to figure it all out again. It gets harder each time, too. This is the first graduation ceremony that I'll be at, and I actually feel a part of me graduating with the Class of 2013. Sure, I knew people in the Class of 2012, and knew of people from '11, but it's certainly different this time. And will be much, much more different this time one year from now, where it'll be happening to me.

But such is the nature of life. We're here, we do our thing, and then we leave, and the rest of the universe moves on without us. Pleasant, no? College is a microcosm of this idea, and I'm seeing the "you leave and the universe moves on without you" part in the near future. Hell, I only have one year left here. One more volume, filled with chapters of who knows what. All I know is that it's an ending I'm looking forward to, because of all of the joy that comes with appreciating what you have. While we come and go, while our books have beginnings and endings, our stories won't stop being told, and that's how we're still a part of the universe when we finish writing our story.

It is 11:16 a.m., and still Friday, May 10th, 2013. I'm still listening to that music from Lost, and still sitting in the same spot, listening to the waterfall to my left through my headphones. For the third time, I feel a sense of completeness with the end of an end-of-the-Stonehill-year blog post. One chapter ends, and a new one begins.