Hello everyone. So I started this as a last night post, but then I realized that wouldn't really work because I wrote this 9 days before I actually leave. But I was just going back to my photos, to watch a video I made of basically the whole year. And I made it just a few days ago, but already I have like 20 photos after it and it’s no longer the last thing in my camera roll. Wow, I know I have so many ~fun memories~. But that’s not it. It’s that that video was my connection to last year. A year that was so unexpectedly amazing in so, so many ways (@real ones). But I honestly didn’t know it would play out like it did at the beginning of this year. And the funny thing is that if I had made a video of junior year, I would’ve been sad at all these unwelcome new senior year memories pushing that year into the past. But those ‘new memories’ - senior year - are some of the best memories of my life, even though they're the ones that solidified junior year as the past.
So that’s why I didn’t welcome the photos that moved the video up into the depths of my camera roll. Cause they really prove that it’s over and in the past. And that’s really scary, cause I had so much love surrounding me last year. And it’s silly to think that the love will be pushed into the past too, cause I know that won’t happen. But still. It’s hard to call my life, the moments that are so special to me, to call them the past. And I know that the pictures to come will make me just as happy. That I’ll be surrounded with just as much love next year. And that I should welcome it. But it’s hard to stop calling last year and this summer my life and rename them what they kind of are now – memories. Cause all of our lives have changed. And I know we’re all going to love them. But it’s scary cause I’m completely in the dark now. Like metaphorically and whatever because I don’t have the light of anyone I know to guide me. But like also, and I know I joke about this but it gets less and less funny the closer September 6th gets, I don’t know Italian. And language is the way you connect with people. The way I made so many amazing friendships this year. And now I have to make a life, or at least start a life, without it. And despite how excited I am for Italy, I’m also really, really scared of that.
Arriving in Italy will be this benchmark for me. It’ll be the start of the rest of my life! just like college was for anyone who’s been. And while it opens a new chapter, it closes another. Puts that senior year video further and further up in my camera roll. Solidifies my current life as memories. And I know I’ll be back. But it will be different. Probably (definitely and hopefully) good different, but different. And that’s ok. It really is. I thought I knew approximately how senior year would go and it ended up being completely different! And my year in Italy will probably be completely different than anything I’ve imagined, given that I know basically nothing about Italy or Italians. I just hope that I will welcome the new photos, and be ok that they push the old ones further and further away. And I hope the old ones will still hold the special place in my heart that they do now.