Leaving Miami

Hi Friends and Family,

A few days ago, I moved out of Miami for good. It took all of two hours to pack up my apartment and leave the city I have lived in for more than four years. It was an incredible four years, but the only tangible evidence that those years even happened is a lot of Facebook photos, a diploma, and some hazy memories… and my friends, of course. They’re still here. But by “here”,  I don’t mean Miami.

College went by so much faster than high school, at least for me. After high school graduation, I was ready to move on to new and exciting things, but now, I feel like I ran out of time. Like I didn’t put enough coins in the machine and my time at UM ended before it should. I wasn’t given the time I needed for college to feel complete. Cause right now, I feel like I should be living in UV2-107B, going to class, and watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S reruns with my friends.

I chose to leave St. Louis and pursue college in another city. I didn’t choose to leave Miami. In fact, sometimes it feels like I didn’t have a choice at all.

Someone famous once said something along the lines of: “people don’t remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel”. It’s true because someone famous said it, but it’s also true because it happened to me. When I look back on college, the memories have become a bit cloudy over time and I don’t always remember what I did each weekend, what parties I went to, what I did in each class… but I do remember who I did it with. I think I expected to have all these awesome memories and stories to prove that I had a worth-while college experience, and I do (and I did), but I realized that what makes college the most memorable isn’t the stories, but the people I met and get to call my friends.

So this cheesy post goes out to all my UM friends, I miss y’all!

Lastly, THANK YOU to Mama Stones for helping me move into my Freshman dorm over four years ago, and then returning again to help me move out of Miami. We’re getting really good at this moving thing.

Fun Fact of the Day: South Africa has 11 official languages. The most common are Afrikaans, English, and Zulu. South Africa has a large Dutch population and that is where Afrikaans comes from, so it sounds very similar to Dutch.