As my life calms down a bit, I have more time to start being prematurely nostalgic about leaving Cleveland. I started looking around campus today, thinking about all the "lasts" that I have coming up, and I started thinking about the last day of my freshman year. A day that is still one of the most perfect days I can remember. The dining halls closed a couple of days before most of us were moving out, so all the Smithies and a few other random friends pooled our money and bought a ton of food and beer and had a barbacue. We played frisbee and chased each other around with water guns and drank right out on the sidewalk, since half of res. life had moved out already and the other half didn't care. Later that night I remember sitting out on the balcony, watching the sun go down behind that one lone tree behind Smith house, trying so hard to memorize everything about how that moment felt and smelled and sounded. Since we (our little group) were practically the only ones left in the dorm, naturally we wandered the empty halls getting drunk. Towards the middle of the night we wandered down to the quad to pee in the phallic fountain, then I chased (stumbled after) Sudiptya when he took a picture of me with my pants down, peeing in the fountain. On the way back to Smith Josh, Adina, and I stopped to talk on the spirally sculpture, which is currently beside the Peter B. Lewis building, but back then it was beside a big empty field. Back then Josh, Adina, and I were like the three musketeers. After finally making our way back to the dorm and washing the dingy fountain water off of me, I spent the entire night on the phone with Dan. After a little less than two hours of sleep I woke up to say goodbye to Adina and pack up my room. It's probably a good thing that I spent the bulk of my last 48 hours as a freshman either drunk or sleep-deprived because it meant that I didn't have to deal with the emotional reality of leaving. Probably not the healthiest way to deal, but by the time I got home to WV I was just happy to sleep for 12 hours straight.

I guess in black and white, the details don't really sum up to a perfect day. But it was.

When I think back on the past 5 years, I feel like I've led two separate lives here at Case. The first half, with the dorms and the DUs and the emotional upheavels (good and bad). And the second half, with the apartment and theater (and slightly more stability?). Funny, you practically could separate out the two lives by where I lived - the first two years in Smith, the past two years on Belmar, with the one year in between in Clark as a transition.