Recently, the Class of 2015 at UCLA graduated, leaving me with senior status. Many good friends of mine are now scattering around the country: one will be joining me in DC this summer and autumn as a policy analyst for a libertarian think tank, another will be undertaking his PhD in political science at UCSD, yet another will be going through three years of law school in southern California. As with all departures, it’s amazing to know that these people call me friend, and that I have the honor of calling them friend back. And yet, when I return to Los Angeles in January, they will not be here. Their absences will be conspicuous.

In freshman year, I took a class called Comparative Odysseys because I needed Honors Collegium credit in order to graduate with College Honors. It didn’t matter in the long run, because I eventually dropped the program in order to take other classes that interested me more. The class discussed the differences between the Western manner of narrating stories (man vs. nature, man vs. man, man vs. self… a very individualistic way of looking at things) and the Eastern way of narrating stories (man learns how to integrate himself into society). I read ten novels in ten weeks. Interestingly enough, all the novels tended to focus on some form of nostalgia. The root of nostalgia is the Ancient Greek word nostos, which means, “to return.” When we tell our friends about the crazy events of last Friday night or reminisce about our childhood, we are literally returning to a place we have been before. I think fondly of the plushness of the carpet in my childhood home (later remodeled to have bamboo hardwood floors), taste a tinge of anxiety as I remember my foot being cut by a heating grate, and smile every time I wake up to see my bookcase. I am back in my childhood home exactly as I remember it, and yet it no longer exists.

As this school year came to an end, I was struck with nostalgia. I still have one more school year, but all I can think is, “I have six months left.” I don’t plan on staying in Los Angeles after graduation, so I probably won’t return for years. It’s so easy to think that January 2016 will never come, as I’m writing from mid-June 2015, but I think about my high school years, and how quickly they went by. And from that vantage point, I know that graduation is imminent. I’m in a stage where I’m constantly saying farewell to the life I had in university, and welcoming the challenge of conquering DC. It’d be pure excitement and terror, if not for the nostalgia.

For me, the excitement and the nostalgia walk hand in hand. They are old friends. Like most of humanity, I am a creature of habit. I like to think I welcome change, but in reality I like to welcome pleasant change, which is usually the kind of change that one can control and plan for. The idea of unmitigated change is terrifying. Most of all, I’m scared to lose things, and I’m scared of losing what I have.

When I graduated high school, I was immensely relieved to leave the school because I knew I had not found who I truly was or where I felt I belonged in the world. I felt as if I was covered in saran wrap, and people could only see the veneer I put on each morning without bothering to understand my flesh and body interior. I didn’t feel as if I had made a close friendship that would last me all my days. Looking back at the last three years of university, I realized that I had become someone I liked. I didn’t like who I was in high school, and I felt painfully awkward throughout. I like the work I’ve put into becoming a better person, and while I have miles to go, I can finally say that I like the person I am. The people I met here are the greatest I’ve ever met, and they are some of the best influences I’ve ever had. And I’m terrified that when I walk out of my commencement ceremony, I’ll lose all of that.

I can’t put it into words better than Marina Keegan, the Yale graduate who died in a car accident a few days after her graduation in 2012. She was an aspiring writer, and wrote beautifully. Her work was collected in an amazing volume called The Opposite of Loneliness. The title of the book is drawn from an essay she wrote for the graduation edition of Yale’s school newspaper. Here is the most oft-quoted excerpt, which deserves to get quoted a hundred more times, and then another fifty times for posterity:

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”

— Marina Keegan, "The Opposite of Loneliness"

Every time I reread this, I get chills. “We’re so young. We’re so young.” And then she died a few days after typing that. We’re so young, we’re so young, and we have no idea how much time we have left. I have written so much: essays for class, posts for this blog, emails full of love and worry to my parents, texts to my friends asking them to go see this concert with me, and I don’t think it’s enough at all. I still have so much more to say, so much more to unbind from my sinews and bend twenty-six letters into indefinite combinations to say what needs to be said. I don’t know where I’ll go from here, but I know I want more time and more chances. To head out to that dive bar a block away from my apartment. To go downtown to see a side of Los Angeles I haven’t yet. To visit the Festival of Books. So much to do, so little time. And that’s where the nostalgia comes from, because I’m leaving this place before I’ve even left.

I have to reread “The Opposite of Loneliness” constantly. Keegan doesn’t end her piece talking about the future and what it holds for us. She ends by talking about the present:

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.”

— Marina Keegan, "The Opposite of Loneliness"

I’m so detail- and plan-oriented that my friends like to make fun of me for those qualities. The ribbing is well-deserved. I’m always thinking about the future, in microscopic detail. So sometimes, I just have to read about the feelings I might be running into the dust, breathe in and out, and remember the beauty of where I am and the moment I’m in. And so I’m learning to let go of the hope and terror and nostalgia to live in the present. One foot in front of the other, so I don’t tumble down the Janss Steps, with the warm glow of the lamps, and my friends around me, breathing in the fresh air and enjoying the cloudless night.