Imminence, Eminence

I don’t usually talk in my columns. I mean, I say things, but you don’t hear my voice. I’m distant — linking and referencing the crap out of every fact. After four years, I'm out of those measured opinions — it's hard to have (publishable) opinions on a regular, biweekly basis. All I have left are thoughts.

First, I cannot believe I’m a senior. After the trauma of trudging through midterm after final, semester after semester, Lawnparties after Lawnparties (of acts I've never heard of — oops), I’m here and I’m alive. It’s jarring because time felt endless as a freshman. OA leader training during Hurricane Sandy? It felt like it was a month long. Walking to the EQuad? Miles. 80-minute classes? No freaking way. I wanted so badly to get over prerequisites and writing sem papers, small talk and small attendance quizzes.

But now it feels like time is nudging me towards FitzRandolph Gate, about to give me a swift kick out the door. I’m pretty sure I want to leave and start real life in a big city, but I know that after I do, I will never walk in feeling the same way. Princeton will never be home again, but only a reminiscence, a sentiment of a dream that I used to take for granted as bare, mundane reality.

I miss so many things about this place, even before it’s over. I’m going to miss waking up at 11 a.m. each day. I’m even going to miss waking up at 9 a.m., because that is still far more generous than real life. I’m going to miss listening to Bach’s Chaconne on my phone in the University Chapel at night just because I felt like it. I'm going to miss getting to see Hilary Hahn herself play the Chaconne in Richardson Auditorium. I'm going to miss feeling sheltered — if I failed a job interview, I could just walk to my friends’ rooms and they would make me forget it with one well-edited Imgur gif. I’m going to miss the freedom of having time to waste because it’s a rare commodity in the real world.

I’m certain I’m going to leave wishing I had done more or done better. Sometimes I already kick myself for things in the past, wishing I could tell myself just to “DO BETTER.” Why did I spend so much time debilitated over minor tragedies that eventually led me to greater things anyway? Why did I care what this person said if he didn’t really know me to begin with? I wish every opinion article I wrote, every word I contributed, could have been a masterpiece. I wish everything I did could have been a masterpiece, but I know it wasn’t.

The urgency is building now to feel like I’ve made some kind of grandiose mark on this place in any possible way. We walk among named buildings and dining halls and fountains and even benches that are testaments to people who have done great, great things and made great, great amounts of money. These are the people who separated themselves from the masses of the nameless who have passed through this prestigious campus without etching its walls.

But maybe it’s not so bad to pass through Princeton quietly. All I hope at the end of it all, for myself and for fellow seniors, is that we’ve learned things we truly wanted to learn. I hope that we’ve all met people who are warm candles and people who are ignited sparks. I hope that we ourselves are each a source of light for somebody else.

I know for certain that when I step out of those gates, I won’t be ready to leave, but I guess the imminence is what makes these short, happy, painful four years so beautiful.