I write this sitting at San Francisco International Airport, waiting for my two checked bags to appear on carousel 6. My entire life, packed into two suitcases. Joan Baez's 500 Miles is playing in my headphones. It feels fitting.

School ended a week ago, and it still doesn't feel real. It's as if I'll surely be back on campus in September, right? As if a week of graduation festivities never happened. The thought of starting all over again is genuinely terrifying. I always entertained the idea of taking gap years, or dropping out to start a company -- sometimes out of existential crisis, sometimes just to annoy my friends. Now that it's actually over, I realize how much I took that experience for granted.

Just a bunch of twenty-somethings, living together on a beautiful campus full of castles that most people travel to photograph their most important days. Princeton was a generous, caring mother that was cruel at times, though of course in a loving way. Deadline after deadline came with our rigorous curriculum, and we could do nothing but whine. A perfectly cooked range of meals, with dessert always waiting, was somehow never quite up to our expectations. We would gather to drink and philosophize, briefly turn into little Marxists to debate how a seventy-year-old professor, who probably has a dozen Nobel Prizes, was doing it all wrong. It was one of the more effective procrastination methods, because at least you wouldn’t feel too bad about taking that extra late day to submit an assignment when you'd just had an extremely intellectual discussion. (Perhaps I should speak for myself on that one.)

Some days were filled with doubt. Others, you felt like you could change the world in the blink of an eye. I think it was a great success. Not because I got perfect grades or met every deadline, but because I was lucky enough to surround myself with incredibly kind, smart, and ambitious people who genuinely cared. And because I had the space and the time to be bold, to be unconventional, to take risks. It was a privilege.

It was all worth it. Every conversation -- be it fun, tearful, full of laughter, or full of discomfort -- I would do it all over again.

Four years flew by. College ended on a random Tuesday afternoon, followed by exhausted seniors scavenging for extra boxes to pack up for the next big thing. It was time to say goodbye to my second home. It'll be alright -- I’ve done this once before.

If you're in the Bay Area, let's connect and have a heart to heart, because I need new friends.

@feruza_dev