I shoved my last sweatshirt into a bin four years ago and sat on it so it would close, tears streaming down my face. I was not ready to come to Fredonia, I was terrified to start college.
I cried the entire drive from Rochester to campus, and I cried even more watching from the window as my parents pulled out of the Nixon parking lot and left me to begin my new life here.
Letting go was never my strong suit — it still isn’t.
I find myself now in the same position I was in four years ago: not ready.
As I’ve looked around my house on White Street the past few days, I’ve started to imagine it as empty. Empty of the miscellaneous pens strewn around the living room leftover from someone’s homework. Empty of the Delta Phi Epsilon banners tacked to the walls. Empty of the lawn chairs on our porch that we sit in while catching up on our days or eating a quick lunch together. Empty of my best friends and the memories we’ve made here. It’s almost impossible to imagine.
Fredonia has become home for me, and it’s never easy to leave home. In many ways, I’ve grown up here.
When I first moved into my kitchen suite in Eisenhower back in 2015, I couldn’t even tell you how to boil an egg. Before I started working for The Leader, I had no idea how to format an article. I have come a long way, but I imagine that I still have far to go.
Back when I found out that it’s tradition for the editor in chief to write the final “From the Desk Of” of the semester, I knew I wanted to use the space to thank those who have made this small town come to mean so much to me.
To 28 White: Thank you for being the greatest house and the greatest friends, despite the shit we’ve all had to deal with — you know what I mean. I couldn’t have survived the past four years without you.
To Jess Tompkins, Ben Rockafellow and Travis LeFevre: Thank you, thank you, thank you for making my job easy and continuously giving me reasons to laugh while we spent hours putting together the paper every Monday.
To the Communications Department and The Leader: Thank you for shaping me into the writer that I am today.
As I was sitting in the backseat of my mom’s car four years ago, I remember Jason Mraz’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” playing through my headphones. “And I’ll take with me the memories to be my sunshine after the rain. It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday,” he sings.
Four years later, it’s still hard to say goodbye to yesterday.