I was told it’s time to start saying my goodbyes in Baltimore.
Every ounce of me is pleading not to.
As commencement approaches in less than a month, there is a feeling of heaviness that aches through every bone in my body. It’s a feeling that doesn’t announce itself loudly. I feel it as I walk through campus, looking at the buildings that occupied my time and hold memories of utter desperation and quiet triumph (thinking about you always, my Gatehouse). I feel it as I look into my friends’ eyes, holding their hands, grasping for the texture of conversations I hope will stretch beyond my time here. I feel it as I step out of my house every morning and wave to the neighbors who’ve made this place my home.
It's knowing that, soon, I’ll be somewhere else, that these people, this city, this version of me will shift into memory.
I came to Hopkins starry-eyed and filled with hopes and dreams of what I’d make out of my four years at this institution. I thought about the classes I’d take, the people I’d meet, the person I’d become.
What I didn’t expect was how much Baltimore itself would shape me. Not just the campus, but the city. The people who waved back when I smiled on the street. The conversations I had in clinic waiting rooms, on late-night bus rides, in corner stores and coffee shops. The parts of the city that broke my heart and the parts that slowly stitched it back together. This wasn’t just a place I passed through. It became something I belonged to and something that belonged to me.
There is no better way to say it other than I’m sad. I’m so sad to be graduating, and I’m so sad to be leaving.
Yes, I am excited for the next steps of my life — to explore new places, to meet new people, to keep becoming. But that excitement doesn’t erase the ache, and it surely doesn’t make the leaving easier.
Because how do you say goodbye to the place where you found yourself? The place where you learned to stay soft in the face of hardness, where you felt your world expand and contract all at once. The place where you met people who changed your life: not always loudly, but deeply.
Lately, I find myself taking the long way home. I walk past the row homes with wind chimes and disco balls, the neighbors who always have their cat perched on the windowsill. I listen to the same playlist I made sophomore year at maximum volume, as if the sounds that once comforted me might drown out the self-doubt and existential crisis that have crept in.
My body is trying to time travel.
Some nights, I take photos of things I’ve passed a hundred times before. As I sit with my roommates, I feel an overwhelming urge to stick my camera in their faces and take hundreds of photos that clutter my camera roll. I don’t know what I’ll do with the pictures. I just want proof.
I think that’s what grief is, sometimes: the gathering of proof that something mattered.
I want to remember the sunny afternoons spent stretched out on the beach or a quad with nowhere to be. I want to remember the warmth I felt after good conversations with professors that left me thinking long after class ended. I want to remember the excitement of planning events with friends, filling group chats with way too many messages, watching ideas come to life.
I want to remember the sound of the front door slamming shut too hard. I want to remember the surge of joy I felt when I heard my roommates screaming, gathered in the kitchen. I want to remember the feeling of coming back from the library with frozen fingers and a fried brain, but comforted knowing someone left the living room light on for me. I want to remember how my friends and I debriefed every moment of our days like they were full-length novels, how, sometimes, we’d knock on each other’s doors just to sit in silence, how we were always within reach.
I’m scared of forgetting what these four years have felt like. Not the milestones or the big things, but the ordinary. I want to never forget the quiet rituals and the soft ways we held each other. I’m scared that, five years from now, these moments will blur and I’ll only remember that they were good, not how they were good.
I don’t have a clean ending. I only have this: a heart that is both full and breaking.
And still, beneath my grief, there’s happiness. There will always be a steady joy that I got to be in this city at all. That I got to love people so deeply and laugh until I couldn’t breathe. I am so grateful to be able to walk through the city that has cracked me open and made space for me to heal. I got to learn, not just in classrooms, but in kitchens and sidewalks and waiting rooms. I got to become someone I’m proud of.
So, here it is, my last piece for my column. What a gift it’s been to belong here, even for a little while.
Thank you for reading and for letting me write my way through these beautiful four years.
Aashi Mendpara is a senior from Orlando, Fla. majoring in Neuroscience and Medicine, Science and the Humanities. Her column shares reflections on her childhood, growing relationships, getting older and navigating life’s changes.
