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Wake up. Shower. Brush. Change. Go down to breakfast.

Our last day began just as any other day would, only infused with an underlying sense of angst and sadness, to put it melodramatically.

Saying our final parting wishes

Breakfast was cut down to less than a half hour, so as to provide five minutes of time on the commons patio for us to say our goodbyes to friends. Strange, how that was arranged. Anyhow, from there on was just a nonstop feels train. People were hugging, laughing over memories of these past three weeks, signing each other's term books...it was like an exaggerated version of the last day of school.

After saying our tearful goodbyes, we were sent to wait on our floors. I still had to finish packing, so I kind of just haphazardly tossed what was left in random suitcases while intermittently going to our floor's common area to see who was leaving. One by one, the proctor group fellas were checked out, and eventually Mom came to pick us up. #chillinwiththefellas#thefellashipwillneverdie

The time spent in the airport/airplane/shuttle seemed to zoom by. I saw roommate Jiayu at the airport one last time, which was extremely odd, as if an actor had taken the wrong cue and showed up in the wrong scene. The plane rides (from Nashville to Atlanta and from Atlanta to SFO) were mostly spent sleeping, with sporadic conversations when we were all awake.

Getting off the plane was, well, weird. The air of SF was colder than the air-conditioned classrooms at Vandy. The clouds were all wrong. I was starving from barely having eaten anything. All in all, it was more like I was visiting another place rather than returning home, strangely enough. We found our luggage and headed back to El Cerrito High School, said our goodbyes, and parted ways.

To be continued

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