Class, work, meetings, bed. Repeat.
My name is Eudora Linde and I am a college senior. I’m trying to pack as much as I can into my senior year before entering the “real world” while still maintaining my grades, being a positive leader with club involvement, holding a job as a waitress and keeping some sort of social life in my final weeks at Shippensburg University.
I am one of the most awful handlers of saying goodbye.
If it’s someone who I care a lot about, I’ll stress about what things will be like without them constantly in my life, and sometimes will even end up in tears over the situation.
I don’t know what happened to me earlier in my life that led to how things are now, but I’ve reacted in much the same way to similar situations since high school.
After my tears have stopped, however, and once my life has somewhat gone back to normal, there is nothing sweeter than unexpected visits with those people. It makes all the trauma of saying goodbye worth it, even if the reunion is just a few hours long.
This weekend at Shippensburg was Homecoming. As I was elected onto Homecoming Court, I had a variety of activities I had to participate in, including a pre-game pep rally Friday night and a halftime ceremony at the Homecoming football game Saturday morning.
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And the weather for all of it was awful.
When I agreed to run for Homecoming Court, I did not anticipate spending three hours outside in rainy February-like weather.
And while I made it onto Homecoming Court, I did not win Queen. All that time spent outside in an illness-inducing environment was all for a tiara (which all the girls on court received), a bouquet, and what seemed like hundreds of photo opportunities.
All of that really didn’t matter though – beyond being excited to just be on Homecoming Court, I was thrilled that my friends who had graduated were coming back to Shippensburg for the weekend.
Phi Sigma Pi (a co-ed honors fraternity that I’m in) had about 20 seniors graduate this past May, and a large number of them came back for the weekend. I was very close, in particular, with three of them – my two bigs (a big is someone who guides a prospective member through the rushing/pledging process) and a third member who was there for me so much through college that she might as well have been one of my bigs.
When Heather, Bridget and Cassie graduated, I was beside myself. I spent more time in their houses last year than I probably did in my own. I ate meals with them, had sleepovers, went on road-trips, got into relatively harmless spots of trouble and thoroughly felt ALIVE when I was with them.
When they left Shippensburg, I felt like I was saying goodbye to sisters who had known me my whole life. I didn’t know when we would all be together again, and it devastated me.
This weekend, however, was a reminder to me that saying goodbye is not always permanent. I was a little sad to see the three of them leave, but it rejuvenated me, and definitely set this weekend apart from the others thus far this semester.
It also reminded me how strong a bond of love can be. I know better now than I did last May that just because I can’t reach out and physically touch someone doesn’t mean that I can’t get to them through a phone or email message. The four of us picked right back up where we had left off - it was like things had never changed.
It reminded me that love is a lasting thing, and that it will take a lot more than a few hundred miles to separate people that I now know will be close as long as we are all able to be.
