I’ve often heard people tell me to enjoy college because it contains “the best years of your life.” Now that I’m graduating in a few months, I get what they were saying. To be perfectly blunt, I feel like I’m dying.
It’s not a physical feeling. It’s just me coming to the realization that in a year, the Luke Macy who attends Miami University will only exist in people’s memories.
I’ve felt it in the air for a while now. People stop coming to you for help; they pay less attention to you. Your peers move on to other things or take over the jobs you wanted to do. It’s not their fault, and you’re proud of them for all their work, but you just start to feel so alone, left out and forgotten.
I was alone once, when I just started college. For the first semester, I lived in my room back home in Springfield, Ohio, only seeing people through my computer screen. The next semester, I had a roommate, but he had his own group of friends already. I had started working at The Miami Student in the audio section, but I didn’t truly feel connected to anyone at Miami until my sophomore year when I became a resident assistant and started writing for the newspaper.
I began to find my footing. I wrote film reviews, which made me happy. I started to do reporting after being told I was good at it. I felt that I was in the right place as I won awards for my writing and was reinforced by other editors. I quickly moved from assistant campus and community editor to managing editor before I finally ended up as digital managing editor, which will be my final official role with The Student.
I truly felt like I had found my place. Now, just as suddenly as I had found it, I’m leaving.
It’s hard to look back on something and only think about the fond memories. After all, I can never return to this life. I have many regrets — not doing more at The Student, chickening out on auditioning for Sketched Out improv, etc. — but I’m trying my best to only think about the good.
The good is that, if only for a little more than a year, I felt happy with where I was. I always felt welcomed in the newsroom. I found a place where I could be proud of myself. I found many professors and friends who supported me.
Friends like Sean, who always supported me more than I supported myself and gave me so many opportunities to grow as a writer. Friends like Devin, who consistently makes me laugh and feel special and who I wish I had become friends with sooner. Friends like Alice, Sarah, Reece and more names than I can type.
I’m not ready to leave. I feel sad that I’ve been slowly and quietly slipping away. I have to remind myself that The Student was not something just for me, and I was only a small part of its decades of existence. I wish it wasn’t ending this way, and I wish there were so many other ways I could have contributed, but now I have no other option than to look back on my contributions with fondness because I certainly can’t go back and change them.
Even though I still talk to my friends at Miami every single day, we’ll each be going our separate ways soon. I’m sure we’ll talk over text and try to coordinate days when we can see each other, but it won’t be the same. The same as it was when I could stop in the newsroom and see one of their smiling faces.
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