This is my last week of class. Possibly ever. I knew it was coming, I'd considered it before I ever left the upper hemisphere, but I've been so busy, life's been in such motion, I've only lately realized the impending situation. Tomorrow and Wednesday, then I am done. School is done and I am done. It must be so since all I've ever known is school, class, late nights and long days--I think it is me, somehow. Australia's been amazing, and I almost don't want to leave. But I am sad to have missed my last quarter at the institution that has been more a home than my home in these past four years. I am sad I have missed seeing those familiar faces, the acquaintances with whom shared grins and grimaces have expressed understanding of the struggle brought on by a particular professor or assignment. And not to say goodbye to the professors I admired and adored. That is a true shame. I am also quite disappointed I won't be walking come graduation day with my fellow classmates to celebrate the accomplishment (what the accomplishment is, I haven't quite decided, but it is, I think, worth celebrating). I think I don't want to leave partly because I love it here, and partly because I don't know what I will do when I return home. Without school, there is work, the so-called real world. But I think about it, and I see the world being closed off, velvet rope extended around those areas that only just before were wide open. I am afraid to miss out on the world. I wonder, from this experience (university), what have I gained? I can read Middle English and scant bits of Old, I can write an A essay in an all-night sitting, I can analyze and argue and compose, but what of that? I took my pants off in front of a class, sang the presidents song to another, crewed a show, took finals on two hours of sleep and I'm not sure what for, exactly. I have learned, I know that. I have made amazing friends. I have struggled and overcome and lost myself and rebuilt from the ground up, and still I'm not sure who I am, what I'm meant to be, where I should go next. I'm still shy and short on confidence and prone to bouts of delirious laughter after too little sleep. Puns and dry wit make me laugh out loud, as do occasional grammatical errors and spoken misstatements. I am further from my grasp of grammar and mechanics, probably, than I was before I started college (I know the rules, but my sense of them has faded--that happens, I suppose, when you start reading more works in which the rules are ignored or blatantly disobeyed rather than strongly adhered to), and closer to my knowledge of musical theatre and Elizabethan/Jacobean drama and politics. Aside from going to classes, studying, reading, reading, reading, learning, reading, writing, reading, and writing, I feel like I've done so little. Not enough to be done, anyway. Yet the unit count tells me I've done more than enough and I've met all requirements for graduation. This is all too strange, too sad. What happens when this has finished?