Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.

Well, there you have it.  Some of my darkest thoughts, inner workings, reasonings, and imaginings, rolled up into a pack of half-truths and prevarications and straight-up lies.  Perhaps you've come to know me better, or perhaps you've come to appreciate my writing.  Whatever the ends, I'm sure the means were justified.  It only felt right.

The whole purpose of NaNoWriMo2010 was to destroy all of the evil, wicked, poisonous thoughts that had accumulated in my brain in my then-seventeen years' worth of life.  It worked a little bit, I suppose.  I feel less bottled up, less trapped.  But some thoughts still linger, as thoughts always do, and I'm sure they'll be there for awhile.  They're still as poisonous, but now it's a different sort of idea.  Instead of writing them out, expressing them out, I'm going to experience them out.  Push them away, forget they exist, and flood them out of memory with new and interesting experiences.

I think it's finally sunk in that I have graduated from high school.  At least, it really did two nights ago, when I went through every yearbook since seventh grade.

My god, how we've changed and how we haven't.

Through the leaves of the books, I watched as my friends and I grew up, changed, morphed into the people we are today.  I watched as friends moved away, new friends moved in, and old friends fell out of favor.  I watched friendships be born, grow, thrive, and fizz out; I watched enemies become friends and friends become foes.  The cycle of life seems to be a never-ending one, constantly changing what we know into strangely familiar scenes, rotated slightly.

I guess it really started with seeing Jessie, Tori, Jason, Aron, and Christine's signatures in my seventh grade yearbook.  Jessie's signature still reminds me of her today.  Tori's signature does too, with "don't trip me! =(" added.  Jason and Aron's signatures were "Stay away from me!" and "<---- Ditto," respectively.  How those have changed.  Christine's was "Stay...wait, never mind," showing that her humor remains fundamentally the same.

In eighth grade, which is around when this blog was started, I watched friendships struggle.  Signatures remained merely names on paper, nothing more.  We were still immature, merely children, thinking we were invincible (more so than I think now, at least), struggling with self-identities and finding our niche in the teenage society of high school.

Ninth grade rolled by.  We matured, becoming more thoughtful and realizing our own personalities more fully.  Friendships already formed grew stronger, new friendships formed, and some friendships died.  Strange connections formed, to be realized and solidified later in high school.  Brief meetings, chance encounters, that sort of thing.

Tenth grade.  We age, becoming aware of our self-identity and what that means in the broad sense of society.  Friendships rise in unlikely places.  Some of them form into relationships, the first relationships to be taken seriously in high school.

Eleventh grade rolls by.  Before we know it, it's senior year.  The yearbook entries grow longer and longer until paragraphs are being written during for senior year.  The memory of things that were, of things that could be, of things that weren't, of things that couldn't be.  We have grown so much since 2006.  It shows in our faces, our actions, our handwriting, our personalities.  We're each an individual, delineated by our unique foibles and mannerisms, first formed around seventh grade.  Sometimes we are wildly different from who we were back then.  In most cases, I think.  Most people I talk to agree that they've changed a lot since middle school.  I know I have.

I had an old blog that I deleted called Symphonic Salad.  Sometimes I wish I could remember what I had written in seventh grade that warranted a blog.  I can't help but imagine that it's more drivel like the original posts of this very blog, crafted in 2007.

As the faultiness of memory makes itself familiar to me, I realize we must say goodbye.  Not now, maybe.  Not tomorrow, not the week, the month, the year, or the decade after.  But eventually.  Last night was the last definite meeting of the LAN Club.  I never realized how final all of this graduation business was until I cracked the yearbooks and read up on how we've changed, where we've come from.  And where we're going.

I've had so many people telling me to keep in touch.  I never really contemplated what that meant until Arjun said that we probably wouldn't see each other for a very long time.  Nic was alluding to the fact that I would probably only see him if I visited Florida sometime.  It's sinking in.  I'm never going to see many of the people I have known for the last thirteen years ever again.

And the ones I keep in touch with...well, that takes work, doesn't it?  I guess that's the hard part.  But I know there are friendships I want to maintain outside of colleges.  Some friendships are just meant to last forever.  Those take work, but they're so rewarding.  How many of my current friendships are lifelong friendships?

I can't say I have the answers.  But goodbyes, though sad, remind me of T. H. White's Merlin, who remembered time backwards: he recalled the future and experienced the past, so final goodbyes meant nothing, but first hellos were bittersweet and sorrowful.

It reminds me that, while goodbyes are sad, they aren't necessarily an ending.  Parting isn't departing forever.  It's just a fork in the road that splits people apart for awhile.

But with that in mind, I am ready to start a new chapter of my life.  I'm leaving the past behind and seeing what the future holds.  Which brings me to the ending of this post.

And this blog.

No, I'll certainly blog more.  It just won't be here.  This place has such a history, such a backstory that it's already 199 posts long.  (Oh my god, really?  My goodbye post is the post right before 200?  FAIL.  My Blogger Dashboard says it's actually 247 entries long, so that makes me feel better.  More than 200 posts, at least.  Not stopping short.)

This place has helped me work out my thoughts and feelings and taught me how to write what I feel.  It's helped me communicate and meet new people.  And I'm appreciative of it.  But I need new digs.  This place is old and worn down.  It's had many names, from "Cantus Pompa" to "Nobody" to "If There's a Rocket, Tie Me To It" to "The Determinant".  It's had a wildly shifting color scheme.  It's been victim to many half-assed HTML edits.

But really, I just want to close a chapter of my life.  I almost consider this blog as a history book about my high school career.  After deleting the log of my middle school career, I promised myself that I wouldn't delete this blog.  It will remain up for perusal.  But I'm moving to a new blog, one that isn't set up yet, on this same account.  Think of it as a sequel, really.  The next chapter in the long story of my life.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson (but more importantly, a dear, dear friend) once wrote, "Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine."

I couldn't think of a better way to end this blog than an homage to friendships past, present, and future.  I guess I'll see you on the flip side.