The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

He runs to make a train he will never catch

to a place he will never go.

His suitcase is filled with clothes he will never wear.

He writes hundreds of letters he will never send.

The salt from his tears is never tasted

so he wonders if he ever really shed them.

He looks in the mirror and realizes that his face looks completely different

when it is inverted.

In the mirror, the edge of his mouth curves upward

but he still swears that his lips rest in a straight line across his face

unless he is smiling.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

Her black dress is her happiest article of clothing.

She ties her hair back so tight

that a person looking directly at her face would argue that it did not exist

when she wants people to notice

how her curls fold neatly into one another like

fingers interlocking

or four-legged animals that sit with their paws folded underneath their bodies.

She is entirely made up of shades of gray,

her eyes only a shade darker than her skin,

her hair a shade darker than her eyes.

When you look closely,

you can tell that her lips are pink,

a pink as pale as a rosebud that is yet to bloom.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

All of a sudden,

she clutches her left forearm with her right hand

and feels her nails make a pattern of white imprints in her skin.

She cannot remember ever touching something so warm.

The act of touching is different from the experience of feeling.

It is not just the direct contact of her body with the warmth,

but the contact of her body with her body,

simultaneously touching the warmth and feeling it.

And as she feels it,

she watches color travel across her skin,

winding its way amidst the gray

like watercolor paint

accidentally spilled on a gray ink wash

depicting a scene of trees that have no leaves.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

The zipper of his suitcase breaks and his clothes steadily drag out

of the hole in the cheap plastic

as if they were attached to each other

like a long chain of handkerchiefs that mysteriously emerge out of a magician's sleeve.

And he does not notice the articles leaving a trail like breadcrumbs in the forest

despite the good-intentioned exclamations of polite passerby.

He chooses not to notice.

He knows what is happening but he chooses not to know

by convincing himself that the world inside his mind is more real than the world outside of it.

And therefore,

he develops control over everything he could possibly experience

in this world or out of it.

And reality stops mattering.

And all of a sudden,

the righthand corner of his mouth is a fingernail's length lower than the medial cleft of his lip.

And he can no longer choose not to notice.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

And the train station is so crowded that he feels himself merge with the people around him.

Nearly losing himself to a sea of lost individuals as he melts into the noise,

a noise so loud that he cannot hear it.

The other ripples in the water step on the chain of shirts and momentarily fall out of sync with the current.

And the colors are all different,

but there is so much color that he no longer sees blue, green, or magenta

but rather he simply sees color.

And the only thing that stands out to him

and wakes him from his trance

is an utter lack of color

a figure completely devoid of pigment

except for a shade of pink that is barely recognizable as pink

but is warmer than the cool gray.

And the pink makes up a line that turns upward on the end.

And the tile on the floor of the station is blue

but he does not know that it's blue.

But he knows that her lips are pink.

We can never know what to expect.

Yet somehow, we always find a way to formulate expectations that are rarely met exactly. We hesitate to get our hopes up while simultaneously remaining optimistic. We find ourselves responsible for examining what we do know in order to have a better grasp of what we do not. We do all this in vain. Because even though we are constantly reminded of the fantastically unpredictable nature of our lives, we can never let go of expectations. We need them to make choices, prepare ourselves for what comes next, and understand the importance of the present moment.

Right now, in this moment, we are cognizant of the infinite quantity of little moments that all add up to this one. We can throw all our expectations aside. We may have expected to be doing what we are doing at this time and in this setting, but we never could have foreseen all the experiences that made it possible. Expecting to be here, on this date, and surrounded by these people only scratches the surface of the reality: the reality that what has been our “future” for years is now our present, and here we are, developing a new future as we speak.

We always think that we know what we want out of an experience.

We fail and we succeed and we feel both proud and shameful. Time and time again our concept of expectations is transformed. The boundaries of our scope of thinking are destroyed. And anything we attempt to preserve can only be preserved in a form that we cannot recognize at first. Nothing stays the same. We change with the world around us. And as we do so, we fail to recognize that change is even taking place. The big changes are made up of infinitesimal ones. And infinitesimal changes do not even qualify as changes. They can simply be described as time. And everything in this world is like time, fundamentally infinitesimal. Some things remain as such and other things experience a shift from infinitesimal to infinite until we can never remember what it felt like for it to be infinitesimal because we never truly knew how it felt because it was too small to even feel but the confusing part is that we cannot even remember the time in between the infinitesimal and the infinite so we wonder how infinity becomes infinity and then we realize that we cannot remember the infinitesimal and the infinitesimal makes up the infinity so therefore we cannot remember the infinity until it becomes infinity and we think that it ceases to be infinitesimal all like that but the truth is it never does. So we see the infinitesimal in the infinite. We see the microscopic in the macroscopic. The spark in the fire. The cell in the skin.

A sweater never ceases to be yarn.

But it is a sweater.

“Hindsight is 2020.” What a wonderfully clever expression. A witty play on words that truly captures what it means to be a human being, an individual who is constantly forced to make choices without ever fully knowing how these decisions will impact the future. Our vision of the future is incredibly weak, while we think we can see the past in perfect clarity. There is no mistaking the past. It’s all right there. Inalterable. The author of this expression was probably very proud of his or her wit. So I feel a little bad saying that this person was so totally wrong.

We warp and deform the past in a manner that is extremely difficult to understand. We all remember things in different ways. No one person’s definition of the past is the right one. Today, my fellow seniors and I look back on this most recent four-year period of our lives in a way that is just dripping with nostalgia. Almost literally dripping with sentimentality. Saturated with our school mascot prancing among puffy white clouds, wearing halos and surrounded by hearts. Our imperfect memories scare us in moments like these. Because nothing, not even our days walking the halls of the Academy, can be perfectly preserved in time. Every one of our memories is affected by our present emotions. A moment is gone as soon as the next moment arrives.

But it does not have to be this sad or scary. All we have to do is trust our emotions. Memories are not intended to perfectly recall the past. Memories are meant to capture the essence of the emotions we felt as we lived these moments. Moments are not perfect, but the beauty of memories is that memories can be. And as we stand here today feeling ever so strongly the emotions of gratitude, nostalgia, love, fear, hope, joy, and sadness, we know that as imperfect as we were, as these last four years were, this place is nothing short of perfect. Perfectly imperfect. Perfect because no other institution, no other community, no other family, could have turned us into the people we are today. And you guys, my classmates, my brothers and sisters for life, are perfect.

I am standing here looking out the window to myself.

Not the myself I will be tomorrow

but the myself I am today.

As I look out this window to myself,

All I can feel is the wind on my face.

And that is all I care about.

Or try to care about.

I don't care about the tables at which I sat

or the fields on which I played

or the lots in which I celebrated everything that exists through this window to myself.

I care about what I feel

on my face

and in my nose and my hair.

And I try not to care about what I see.

I try not to think about the fact that I will never look through this window to myself

and have it look the same.

But I can still feel the feeling.

Because the wind feels happy and the scene looks sad.

Not sad sad. Happy sad.

But happy sad is the worst kind of sad.

Because you are happy because you are sad.

And you cannot focus on feeling sad because you want so badly to be happy.

But the want makes you sad.

The want to be happy makes you sad.

It makes you sad because you cannot want something so intensely that it becomes a need and not feel at least a little bit sad.

When if you did not try so hard or want so hard or need so hard to be happy then you would be.

So I am going to look out this window but I am not going to see.

I am not going to see the things that I someday will be unable to see.

I am going to feel.

I am going to feel because there are limits to what we can see.

But there are no limits to what we feel.

This here is our year

We’re meant to be here

United

Excited

So let me be clear

This here is our year

There’s nothing to fear

We own it

The moment

It finally appears

We wake up every day

Not much feels out of place

Some things we want to erase

But here out of God’s grace

Is a group that’s unlike

Anything I’ve ever known

There’s a word to describe it

But that word I’ll postpone

reciting

Uniting

ourselves together as one

A team from the start

Family by the time we are done

But we’ll never be through

This I know through and through

There’s so much we’ve come through

But so much left to do

We think that we know

What it means to succeed

To love

Be proud of

And know how to believe

And still every morning

Nothing feels new

Until all of a sudden

There’s me and there’s you

And there’s us

And we wonder, "Where did all this come from?

What are we to become?

What will be the outcome?”

And this much I know

There’s a lot that I owe

To the people

Who let me

Breathe in and let go

Of the trivial

visible

physical

typical

All things that get in the way of unstoppable

Here we are

And this gift

To our lefts and our rights

This is where it exists

In the grit and the fight

That we see in our eyes

In our faces it glows

And we finally realize

That here we behold

The unstoppable

It’s our year

It’s right here

Turn the gears

Face our fears

We adhere

To the cheers

It is clear

That we’re near

The unstoppable

We fight

With our might

We delight

Reach new heights

It’s in sight

It’s tonight

Future’s bright

It’s our right

We’re unstoppable

I find that it is only in retrospect that I truly consider the realness of things. I am never brought to question authenticity in the moment of happening. Everything appears to be real as it is present, and is it not true that existence proves reality? The mysterious and somewhat frightening fact about the passage of time is that it gives us pause about existence. Emotions are fleeting wherefore memories are fleeting, and once we decide to hold onto an emotion, we find that it slips through our fingers ever more swiftly. Without the emotion, the memory ceases to be.

This is what makes it impossible to conjure a memory in its realest form. The memories that remain with us come to be the most real, and those that fade away are doubted as ever being actual. This inevitability is enigmatic and unfortunate because it skews our perception of significance. Memorable equals significant; forgettable equals unremarkable. In fact, because experiences and sensations are only genuine as they are happening, their being malleable to us makes them malleable in actuality. We interpret things differently over time, but we as vital entities do not give ourselves enough credit in this regard. The moment that experiences become memories, they enter our personal domain, and we have the power to alter their very being. Not only do we have the power to do so, but we are bound as such. Time emulates change, and time, as we all know, is more permanent and uncontrollable than anything else in this universe.

When we come to a juncture that seems to be a critical one, a graduation, a wedding, a funeral, for example, we often assess the probability that certain memories will stand the test of time. We will view these memories differently, of course, each time we visit them, and therefore, they themselves will change. But will they remain, at least, in some sort of changed form? Each of us will remember small, seemingly insignificant things for reasons we cannot explain. Similarly, we are perplexed how moments that shape us so substantially are often lost in time. De facto, this phenomenon is not as paradoxical as it appears. Our minds are structured in such a way that we, in some manner, remember all there is to remember. The little things jump out as memories, and we do not waste our power of recall on the “bigger” experiences because they resurface and attend to us in tangible forms every day. A moment that is consequential enough to change our very form of being never reaches the condition of memory because it never surrenders existence.

Memories, therefore, are only snippets of sentimentality purely for our amusement. Everything that is real is not a memory, and memories, when they become memories, are no longer real. That is not to say that remembrances were not once existent, but it is natural that they be replaced in the course of time. In this fashion, when I find myself at a turning point in my life, I find it valuable to view experiences and moments as interconnected, fluid, and enduring. Nothing disappears, it simply evolves just as human beings do, and this extinguishes the finality and sorrow in goodbyes.