I don't write often, but I believe the plethora of works titled “Untiled document” that litter my files could compose a book. and i always write for a reason. whether it’s anger or sadness or a school project. Even if school isn’t forcing my pen to paper, I still write when I feel. There have been so many things I have written about, and I find myself writing most when I have no other outlet. letters to people that will never receive them. pages about a girl who had her heart broken. A note that someone could find on the inside of a birthday card, even if they never will. The list is almost infinite.

I feel lost right now. I'm about to leave the past 10 years of my life behind. I moved to Georgia exactly 10 years ago. It was the summer of 2013, and I was just about to start 5th grade. My mom had decided she needed to leave our home in Virginia, for death lurked there, she thought. Her memories laughed and weeped in every creek of the linoleum kitchen floor. Several eight hour car trips later, we found ourselves on the floor of an empty two story house, a day before the movers would arrive. We tried to sleep on deflating air mattresses in the floor of our soon-to-be living room while my mom chased neighborhood teenagers out of our soon-to-be fenced in backyard. I could write a memoir about everything that happened to me while I lived in that house. Moving in. The humiliation and wonder of middle school crushes. All of the animals who would join our home. The best and worst teachers. Friendships that will and won’t last forever. Coming back for college summers. The tacky blue butterflies that are plastered to the corner of my bedroom wall. I could fill a memoir and still find myself remembering details too convoluted to write down. Stories that influenced stories. All stemming from my time inside the comfort of those walls.

They say that there are different sizes of infinities. When learning about that in high school mathematics, I understood it in the equations. Of course, infinity is a number and like all numbers, you can multiply and divide it. I also understood the concept that there is an infinite amount of decimals between 1 and 2. 1.1, 1.12, 1.123 and so on. I digress. As we were learning about all of these numbers, I remember trying to imagine how different sizes of infinity could be applied to real life. I thought back to it often, all the way through high school, even into college. The number of people in this world is finite. If someone could transcend space and time, one could even do a headcount of every single person who has ever been on this planet. Or the universe.

I am not a scientist. I do not understand the unlimited expansion of our universe. But I know that it is believed that it will go on for forever. Infinity. But the expansion of the universe is, I reiterate, thought to never end. So what in our world could possibly be indicative of a little infinity. With a start and an end, whose contents can go on forever? I have never been good at riddles. The other day, my friend Leah sat on my couch as we brainstormed riddles for a game I’m planning for some of my other friends. We went through copious amounts of little internet lists of the top 10, 50, 100 riddles that would stump your friends! And while we were looking through, Leah had a thought. She said that this, this was her hardest riddle. Someone told it to her once, it wasn’t on the list, but no one had ever gotten it right without being told. Or unless they had heard it before. Are you ready? “Poor people have me. Rich people need me. And if you eat me, you’ll die. What am I?” Even though I started our whole exploration with “I have never been good at riddles”, I refused to let her tell me the answer. I know that I am bad at riddles, and I also know that I am very stubborn. So we moved on from that riddle while I pondered on the idea of what the answer could be, and we continued down our many lists, trying to pick the best riddles for my friends. A number of lists that almost seemed infinite.

I was watching a video from the vlog brothers before I began to write this.. We’re here because we’re here. A video where John Green. internet sensation, vlog brother, and writer of the fault in our stars, walks in the snow and explores the song Auld Lang Syne and how that old scottish new years song reflects hope, misery, and the human condition. In this “review of the song”, as he puts it, he mentions his mentor Amy Krauss Rosenthal and her strange and beautiful self titled memoir textbook. In this book Amy wrote “if one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it’s 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot. But it is not infinite. And anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.” I think Amy’s text and this whole video (great video John if you ever see this) resonated with me, in part because I have kept searching for the answer to the little infinites riddle, well past when my teachers had moved on. I may not be good at riddles, but I know what it is like to live. I know that there is a finite number of times that I will look at a tree and that the finite limitations that the concept of numbers has over my life deems it unsatisfactory. That the confines on time having a start and end is not representative of the way that life is experienced and that if there are little infinities between these numbers, there must also be between my start and my end. Life cannot be finite. It’s not the way that it’s experienced. In one of my favorite novels of all time, The Perks of being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky writes “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.” Life doesn’t feel finite when we’re living it. So how can that be, when we all know it ends?

I mentioned before that I am lost. I am about to leave the place that I have lived for the last 10 years of my life. Before moving to Georgia, I had only lived in one other home, and much like my mother, I was not too hesitant to move away from a place where darkness seemed to leak out of our walls. This time is much different. There is no haunting metaphor in the new green living room paint, no more than there is already in the passage of time. Those things that seem to follow us everywhere. I have already moved out of my childhood room. The blue walls with dark blue butterflies in the corner is not where I sleep. But it is still mine. In just a few months it won’t be anymore. Maybe some other girl will move in there and think it’s strange that someone would ever want the walls to be two different shades of blue, much like I thought it was strange when we found the little school pictures of that boy on the old ceiling fan. I am familiar with endings. My favorite book. High school. Relationships. A job. Death. Things end. I know that. And often when things end, they don’t feel satisfactory. I graduated high school in 2020 and like everyone does in the 2020’s, I posted a picture on instagram with my cap and gown. At the time I wrote “When I was talking to Syd about this weird graduation limbo, she said that it felt like we were all going back in August. That nothing has actually changed. I don’t feel like that.”...” This doesn’t feel real, and I’m kinda afraid that it never will. That I’ll never feel like I’m done with high school. Like when I die, my ghost is gonna be stuck at brookwood high school”. Looking back, I could assure that girl in big silver hoops, with bright red hair, that it does end. Even just a few years later, you have left that place far behind. But that’s how endings feel, isn’t it? That it can’t really be the end. It was easier then, to feel how high school seemed infinite. I never walked across the stage, and so that meant my soul would be stuck there forever. I have since moved on and I can assure 17 year old me that those were not the best years of my life, and the end was just the beginning of something new. But even if it was a beginning, it was an end. A concept much better understood by numbers than by antonyms. I can have an infinity between 1 and 2, and a separate infinity between 2 and 3. The first ends at 2 and the second begins at 2, but 2 is never a beginning and an end at the same time. Two is always two. And two can either be viewed as the start. Or the end, depending on which infinity you are looking at. That same concept is applied to graduating high school. It was a start and an end, definitively. There was a day, a real number, when I had legally completed that high school degree. And there was a real day when I moved out of that house in Virginia. This doesn’t stop that time from feeling infinite. And I still don’t entirely understand how that could be.

You would think, knowing what I know, I would feel solace in knowing what I know about the nature of things ending. I feel, however, in the current moment, the opposite. I don’t feel as though my soul will be stuck inside the walls of my metro-Atlanta apartment, swinging on a bench by my sophomore dorm, nor mourning the hallways of my family home. I spent all of middle and high school in this place. Went to college. I have wept openly and silently. Slammed fists on tables in rage. Laughed and kissed and fell deeply in love. I have done all I have to do here. And I know that when I leave, I will move on. Yes, maybe there is a slight glimmer of peace I feel in inevitability. Yet, I sit here writing this at a desk, words littered in fear and uncertainty. I have had this desk for many years. There is a heart carved into the wood, right beneath my mousepad. I carved it there when I was in 6th grade, because I thought that I could doodle on the wood like an engraving. To my utmost surprise, it turned out shaky and like, dare I say, a middle schooler carved something into my desk. I tried to remedy it with wood marker years later, but nothing I had easy access to could really fix it. It has taken 9 years, but I love what 11 year old me produced. I have art that I can point to and laugh and tell a story about. And I will have that story forever.

Once I leave, I can’t make stories here anymore. Ten years is a long time and I’ve made a lot of stories. I know that life isn’t a novel. There is no one person holding the reins, describing everything in such great detail, bringing the most important elements to the front and wrapping up plotlines before the story ends. But I’m afraid that I’m leaving too soon. An end is an end is an end is an end. From where I sit right now, I know that something will come after, but I don’t know what it will be, who I will meet, what I’ll see or learn or who I will keep. I know that tomorrow morning I will wake and dawn my green apron and go to work. I know that soon I will see my friends for lunch. That I’m bound to go back to Big Owl coffee and get another pistachio honey latte. That I’ll drive back through my hilly neighborhood in Gwinnett, by the neighborhood pool I never went to and the house of that girl I helped in 5th grade. And I know that in a month, I will never know if any of that will be true ever again.

I don’t know if I will see my friends in person again. If I will hug them awkwardly at their weddings or if time and space will drift us further apart. I don’t know if I’ll ever speak to him again, despite how much I loved him. And I don’t know what will become of my dark blue butterflies in the corner of my bedroom. Once those boxes get packed into the back of that moving truck… Once I shut that car door. Seatbelt buckled. Key turning in the ignition. Once I drive back down those winding roads, past that neighborhood pool. Get on the highway. I know that is the end. I can’t go back once it has ended. And I have no fucking idea what lays on the other side, and I am lost. I’m lost, because I can’t know where I’m going. I know I can’t close every plotline. I can’t say every goodbye and give every hug and say all my peace. I’m lost and I’m scared because the darkness of uncertainty is creeping closer and closer and I feel like I’m forgetting to breathe.

 I have various white boards around my house. One is a calendar I try (and fail) to update once a month. The other is one that I use when I have random lists I need to write down. On both I often find myself penciling in time to breathe. More recently I will find where I have written “Don’t forget to breathe. You still have time.” It is usually accompanied by a smiley face or something similar. It is now, in the last month that I have before the end, that I realize that, more now than ever, I need to remember to breathe. I still have time. And yes, that time is fleeting, but there is a comfort in knowing that the end will be waiting for me. And I need to remember that there is a beginning that starts right after the end. That maybe, just maybe, in the time I have spent here, I have created a little infinity.

I’ve thought about how I would end this essay for over a week. There is a part of my mind that believes that maybe I’m right on the edge of an answer. Like I could write this whole thing and sit on it for a moment and then the riddle would be solved. For those that know me, not only am I not the best at riddles, but I’m also not very good at metaphors. I always seem to be onto something, and then it starts to fall apart at the end. I know that there are little infinites in the things we do, on every level. But I don’t know exactly how I could begin to explain it. Like my subconscious knows the answer but my mind hasn’t caught up yet. Even though I might not know all of the intricacies of my metaphors, I know that now I’m just a few days away from moving away. For the last few days, I’ve been so focused on everything I don’t know, so I think I’ll end all of this with focusing on what I do know.

I know that I’m scared of the unknown and everything that is to come. I know that I’m less afraid of things ending, and more so of new things beginning. I know that leaving is breaking my heart. I know that things are going to change and I’m going to grow. I know that pretty soon, I’ll be in a new apartment that overlooks the harbor. I know that I’m going to feel so much better after this is all over. And I know that everything that happened while I was here, in this time and space, will somehow continue forever. Even if I don’t know quite how that could be.