After over two months of online learning, most seniors have settled into a new routine. We log into Google Classroom, receive assignments over email, and check in with teachers once a week or so on Zoom. For many of us, the days blur together without bell schedules, sports practices, and weekend competitions to distinguish one day from the next. The monotony makes it easy for others to forget what was supposed to be happening right now. To forget that I, and roughly four hundred other seniors, were supposed to graduate in three days. 

  But I have not forgotten, even if the days blur together for me too. And neither have my fellow students. Transitioning from high school to college is tumultuous enough without the added stress of Covid-19,  but we have no choice but to confront both head on.

  Our senior year was supposed to look like those we had watched for years growing up. Senior prom, walking across the stage at graduation, cheering for sports games, waving goodbye on the last day of school. All of those milestones have been ripped away. Our 50 day dinner was traded for a date weeks ago that I didn’t even register as a countdown to the end of my senior year. Graduation has been rescheduled for a date in August that will likely end up being cancelled as well. The last day of school—what should be a day where I acknowledge the teachers and peers I’ve spent 4 years with—will instead be noted by simply not logging into Google Classroom one last time. 

  It’s easy to dismiss these losses. In ten years I likely won’t remember my graduation, in twenty I probably won’t be able to tell you the names of people I spent an entire year in class with. But prom and graduation aren’t just celebrations of four years of hard work. They’re cultural rituals designed to help seniors accept the end of high school and begin the transition to college and adulthood.

  When those events are stripped away—when there is no signal that I have officially finished high school—it’s hard to really prepare to leave. To say goodbye to teachers, friends, and family. To this town, this community. I have written “send thank you email to Mr/Ms. ___” a dozen times in my planner. I have yet to write a single one. I have dreamed of making scrapbooks full of memories to give to all my friends. I haven’t started. I have told myself to schedule bike rides and zoom calls, because before I know it, summer will be over and I will be across the country from the people I love. And yet day after day I sit at home, too hesitant to reach out. I’m not the only one. 

  “I feel like I’m going to college prematurely, as if I never truly finished high school,” said senior Erin O’Neil. 

  The issue is that while the summer between high school and college is typically a period of instability—leaving home, starting new classes, making new friends—we’ve been prepared to cope with those changes. We have seen siblings and older friends confront those challenges and come out the other end. Covid-19 has taken away the familiarity of this transition. Instead of worrying about the academic adjustment in college, we don’t even know if we’ll start in fall. Rather than stressing about making new friends, I’m unsure if I’ll even be leaving my current ones. I feel paralyzed. I don’t want to prepare for goodbyes I won’t have to say. But I don’t want to waste what might be the last months I have. 

  “I’ve gotten no ‘closure’ on high school; everything just kind of stopped and I’m in this weird limbo,” said senior Lulu Dai.

  In a way, these feelings are the same ones every senior has had. This is inherently an emotional time in life. And I have faith that in a few years, this won’t seem nearly as hard as it feels right now. But it is hard right now. It is hard to accept the end of four years of my life when there isn’t even a real conclusion.

  I don’t have a solution to these emotions. It will be hard to leave regardless of what I do over the next months. But I do know I need to stop waiting for something to change. There will not be a signal telling me it’s time to write those thank you emails or go on those bike rides. There won’t be a headline that will tell me it’s time to start really saying goodbye. There is just me, having to accept this change instead of pretending it’s not really happening.