I Feel *a* Last by Paige B. '24

Song: Dancing in the Moonlight by Olive Klug

It’s 9:05 am. The sunlight subtly and softly trickles into the room just like it did all those episodes ago in the season premiere. However, this time the room isn’t a bedroom, but a classroom. The camera pans over tens of student’s heads bent over blue examination booklets, and stops at me scribbling away at my complex analysis final with a dark blue .07mm G2 pen with the cap chewed off.

A voice narration begins.

I attribute many feelings to love or to hate. When asked how I feel about a situation, I usually say something akin to “I love that feeling when” or “I hate that–“. It’s a bit of a catch-all really. Because what I mean to say is that I am feeling a feeling about something. What that feeling is, or even what precisely that something is, often alludes me. All I know is that I like or don’t like how I feel about this feeling (that I can’t quite pin down), and I say that I love it or (more often) that I hate it. This is how I talked about my first day of my junior year nearly three months ago. I hated, and felt invigorated, by how fresh the semester felt.

Fresh starts are good, but they always feel fresh. Like a paper cut your mind can’t quite ignore yet, or the very first thoughts of grief. It was hard to not feel bittersweet about reaching the halfway mark of my time at MIT. I felt like there were too many stories left to be told. And that scared me.

Now the semester is ending,

*I look up at the clock*

and I still don’t know how to describe how I feel. But oh boy will I try harder than just saying that I love or that I hate it.

Because this time, I’m choosing to feel “it” more.

It has been a really rough semester. Like, an “Oh no what if I need to use all four Pass/No Records” kind of semester. Like a “let’s start up weekly therapy appointments again” semester. One that drags on and on while simultaneously speeding through the days like a camera cutting from one scene to the next.

I expected to feel some amount of relief with the ending of the school year. I was ready for this giant sigh of “I’m done” after I closing my last exam booklet.

*I set down my pen, grab my backpack, and leave the classroom.*

And it isn’t like I don’t feel some amount of relief. It’s just that it feels exactly the same as every semester before. It’s a tad bit sadder given how hard of a semester it’s been, but I still just feel done. I get to leave a part of myself behind me, and move onto what’s next.

Is the word for this closure?

I think it is. The semester started, it went by, and I finished. Now I get to go home for ten days. I get to prepare for the feeling of yet another fresh start. I get to feel whatever this feeling is for as long as I want to feel it.

I start walking towards Next. It hasn’t started raining yet. But the rain will come soon. It always does somehow.

Song: Burned Out by dodie.

The camera cuts once more to me packing my suitcase and my carry-on for my flight tomorrow morning.

I used to hate the last day of the school year, almost more than I hated the first day. I’d feel this slight sorrow of knowing that I would need to push through another semester and exceed my own expectations for myself.

I don’t feel this way anymore. For the first time, I feel ready for a break. A mindful, perhaps somewhat chaotic, intentional break. I hate that it took vaguely breaking a little bit for me to finally give myself the room to take an actual break, but I’m ready for it nonetheless.

To the few more semesters I have left (62.5% complete),

*I pack two notebooks into my backpack*,

to many more songs

*I plug my headphones into the USB-C cable*,

and to many, many more blogposts.

Song: Til Forever Falls Apart by Ashe and Finneas.

The camera pans out of the window and points towards the sky. The sky changes color to indicate the passing of the day. It pans back down to my window, as I type this last blogpost (for me) for this year, and I close my laptop.

—

p.s. also, really really unimportant, but there’s a blogger Spotify account now and I have a playlist of all the songs (and a few more) from these posts, as well as blogger wrapped playlists, and more!