For starters, checking todays date for the post just made me super excited that Saturday is my birthday.

My incredibly awesome best friend already got me a Harry Potter Snuggie, and its fuckin’ awesome. 

On to more important things.

I’m a senior. Holy sweet jesus I’m a senior.

I’m a SENIOR

Imaseniorimaseniorimasenior

I used to forget that a bunch. But after all the college apps and portfolio reviews, I’m much more in the mindset.

My portfolio got accepted to School of the Art Institute of Chicago and California College of the Arts, meaning essentially that when I submit an application I’ll be accepted. 

But what I also realized recently is that despite how much I like photography, I’ve worked so hard and learned so much in the field of technical theatre that its become a critical part of my life. And so I also submitted an application to the University of Southern California’s School of Theatre, and I have an interview with them scheduled in a couple months, all the way out in Chicago. Which is really chill.

However, the hardest part of being a senior is knowing that there will be a time, sometime soon, that I’ll be leaving. This is- to use some existentialist terms- a facticity, something that can be confirmed by a third party. Its not as absolute as death. There are a number of things that could change between now and then that would keep me here. But at the end of next summer, I will hopefully be somewhere other than here.

And it was realizing this that led me to go back to being just friends with my now ex- girlfriend. I say that, phrased in that way, instead of saying that I’ve broken up with her, because breaking up is not what happened. Yes, we are most definitely not in a relationship anymore, but breaking up implies so much more than that. When something is broken up, it’s in separate pieces, damaged in such a way that they no longer fit together. What happened between Liz and I is not this. We still talk, and we still fit together in the same group of friends, the techies. Breaking up, breaking apart, is what would have happened if we had stayed together.

No matter the course of the relationship over the next 6 months, the almost facticity of my leaving would have meant that what we had would have had to come to an end. But the terms on which things were left would be radically different had we broken up then.

If we kept going, got closer, more open, more vulnerable, that moment when I am somewhere else becomes not about going back to being just friends but instead about leaving something unfinished. We would leave each other knowing that we still had unresolved feelings for each other, and that the only reason we couldn’t be together was because of the distance. And this would make visiting her and all the other techies just that much harder. Ending things now gives us time to go back to being just friends, and when I leave and come back to visit I won’t be leaving behind the broken pieces of a relationship unfinished, just a good friend who would be easy to come back to.

I have a bracelet on my right wrist that I’ve been wearing since my freshman year, and today I had this weird moment where for the first time since then, I noticed the feel of it on my wrist. And more than that, for the first time I wanted to take it off, and feel what it would be like to not be wearing it, feel my bare wrist without that knotted and worn string around my wrist. In the same way, for the first time since my freshman year, I don’t want a relationship. This isn’t about how I feel about Liz, and this isn’t about how I feel about anyone else. It’s that sometimes, to save what you have, you have to let things go. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow then. And all the other days.” -John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson