Convocation

The room is finally - finally - packed. It took the entire day, but everything is ready to go, stuffed into some suitcase, box, or bag and ready to be heaved into what I can only hope is a very large sedan tomorrow morning.

Tonight was convocation for the honors college. I cannot describe how it felt to sit in the audience and watch my class graduate without me - their names, degrees, and thesis titles read off one by one. Handshakes with professors and hugs and smiles. I felt oddly detached. It wasn't so much a feeling of loss or a feeling that I should be up there with them - I knew that this would be the price of a year in Germany from the start, and willingly made that trade - but it was the stranger feeling that I was simply out of place, an outsider, that I no longer belonged to what used to be a family of sorts for me. This feeling was only intensified when the ceremony ended and everyone flooded out into the hall, converging with parents and friends, leaving me to wade through a shifting sea of people all josting to get pictures with their graduate. I have never felt so alone amongst so many people before, and it was then that it really hit home that it's all over and done.

If nothing else, it was worth it to see the smiles on my friends' faces and the triumph and pride that they were radiating. I was, by the grace of God, able to enjoy the night for what it was - a celebration of their accomplishments - and to be truly, honestly, deeply happy for and proud of them. They are amazing, each and every one.

After congratulating and saying goodbye to those friends I was successful in finding, I slowly walked home, soberly aware that, in many cases, watching my friends walk across the stage tonight was the last time I will ever see them.