It has always surprised me that the moments in life meant to make you feel like the main character of a coming of age movie have just never felt like such.
High school graduation was just another day walking through classroom hallways where red paint was peeling off beams maintaining the structural integrity of a loose foundation in young education. Moving into dorms freshman year of college felt like the beginning of an awkward sleep away camp. Studying abroad felt like an episode special, one that resumes to normal after the guest has had their moment. All of these events were meaningful, but still they were all an extension of the life I’ve come to know for so long.
But every meaningful moment I thought to encapsulate change and nostalgia was suddenly overshadowed recently when I was packing up my childhood bedroom to move my whole life a 4 hour drive away. My veins were pulsing of familiar stress while shoving shoes into tote bags and books into boxes when something made me stop and look around.
My childhood bedroom, the place I had always returned to, the place that I had always called home even when living away for most of the year, was now bare beyond ever before. A room that had always been my own was no longer, and I had just deconstructed it as if it held the same weight as packing a suitcase for a weekend vacation.
It felt like high school graduation, moving into the dorms, going abroad, graduating college, and every heartbreak and love to follow hit me like an emotional truck watching the empty void that used to be my room, the only home I had ever known, now be decorated only with dust and cat dander.
As I stacked my car to the brim and closed the trunk, I asked my mom to let my little cousins make it their own. To add things back into the space, to bring some life back into it. Maybe part of me feels the only way to memorialize my dead childhood is by letting the kids still around keep it alive as they wish. But it won’t be me. At least not anymore.
How does one even get to the point where they’re not a kid anymore? I don’t know, but I just felt it for the first time.
My undergrad graduation felt like a drawn out novel, one so lengthy that you’re not sure it will ever end. From graduating in December to traveling to Guatemala in January, to working an admin job in February, to landing a full time job in March, to traveling to British Columbia with my two best friends in April to moving in May, finally we’ve arrived in June and it’s time for the final celebration. Now it’s over. I’m done with it all and I knew that.
That’s why on June 14th, 2026, the only feeling I had available in my body was love. Love for my family, love for my friends, love for all the bullshit life has ever taught me and continues to teach me, because that love is the only true thing any of us have to hold onto. It’s the only thing I can cling to, and the only thing I know I’ll never let go of.
And I’ll be grateful for every moment life lets me live with this love, in whatever form it chooses to take.
