Our time here is measured in two ways. Monday mornings to Friday afternoons. Five day weeks. Fourteen week semesters. In one way our time is spent scribbling down answers, writing last minute papers, filling in those little bubbles, taking pages of notes. The rest of the time is measured by Friday night movies, and sleeping in, minutes and hours spent in front of the mirror, walking miles in the freezing cold, Sunday morning bunch, those classic songs that never get old. It's measured in memories, in drunk conversations in the middle of the night that turn into sober ones. In this way, time is determined by people. The ones that come and the ones that stay and the ones that leave; the relationships that are built here- they're the marker of time. The truth is either way you look at it, it's four years. It's eight semesters, twenty eight Saturday nights a year, twenty eight Monday mornings. We have four years to get it right, until our time here expires, until we're forced to face things a little more worrisome than Monday morning. Yet I feel like we live our lives here as if time will never run out. Like if the sand were to ever dwindle down, we could just flip it over and start again. I forget sometimes, how small and insignificant the amount of time four years is on the scale of our entire lives. Just a tiny speck on the journey. It's still new to us, this concept of time. It's still something we take for granted because we're young. We constantly pray for Friday night's quick arrival, we can't wait for that test to be over, or this horrible day to be done, we wish the time away before our twenty first birthdays because we always think there's bigger and greater things that lie in our future than what's here right now. And there probably are. But when I get there, if I ever make it to graduation day, I want to look back on my journey and be satisfied. I want to know I spent every moment exactly as I should have. Because I know this place, these people, this situation right now, this is just a phase in the journey. And I know one day, instead of wishing time away until the future, I'm going to want it back, this very moment right now. The good days and the bad days out of these four years, I'm going to want them all back.

A Good Thing

It's strange how memories can creep up on you. You consciously do your best to put them behind, shove them far in the past, and for a while there you actually do start to forget and move on, so you don't have to pretend as much that a small part of you isn't still living back there. And just like that, for whatever reason a thought is triggered and all of a sudden its crashing over you like a huge tidal wave, and you realize you really hadn't forgotten as much as you had originally thought, or would have liked to believe. It really does take a while when emotions are involved, more so than we plan on. I guess we underestimate how much time to give ourselves to move on because we don't realize the impact some things have on us, even if it was for just a short period of time. So maybe rather than forcing the memories away, we should accept them. Accept that maybe there is a little bit of you still left in that time. And realize that's okay. Realize even so, you move on further and further from the past everyday, but that doesn't mean you can't take a little bit of it with you everywhere you go. And that maybe that's a good thing.