Forty days doesn’t sound like much. It’s shorter than a basketball season, and barely longer than a Lenten promise you forgot about halfway through. But somehow, forty days is all that’s left of something that has quietly taken up most of my life.
As I sit here counting down, it doesn’t feel real. There’s still homework to turn in, games to play, group chats to answer, and the daily routine of walking the same halls I’ve walked since I was fourteen. Life feels normal until it doesn’t. Until it hits you that soon, all of this will be over, and “normal” will look completely different
It’s strange to think about how long I’ve been preparing for something I didn’t even fully understand. Kindergarten feels like a completely different lifetime, but somehow it led here. Back then, success meant staying inside the lines when coloring and not forgetting your lunch. Now it’s college decisions, final grades, and trying to figure out what you’re doing with the next four years of your life.
Freshman year feels like a blur of awkward introductions and pretending you knew where your classes were on the first day, even though you definitely didn’t. Sophomore year was a little more confident, but still figuring things out. Junior year hit and suddenly everything mattered. Now, senior year is somehow both the fastest and slowest year of all. Every moment feels like it’s slipping by too quickly, but at the same time, we’re all counting down the days.
There’s something funny about how the things that once felt so important don’t seem to matter as much anymore. The stress over a bad quiz grade, the awkward moments that felt like the end of the world, and the small dramas that consumed entire weeks. None of it holds the same weight now. What sticks instead are the little things: laughing way too hard during class, late night drives, random inside jokes that make no sense to anyone else, and the feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be without even realizing it at the time.
And then there’s the bittersweet part, the part no one really prepares you for. In forty days, everything changes. The people you see every single day won’t be just a few lockers away anymore. The routine that once felt repetitive will be gone, replaced by something new and unfamiliar. The idea of “later” turns into “now,” and suddenly, growing up isn’t something in the distance, it’s happening.
It’s exciting in a way. There’s freedom in the unknown, in the chance to start over somewhere new, to meet new people, to figure out who you are outside of the place that has shaped you for so long. But it’s also scary. As much as everyone talks about moving forward, there’s something comforting about what you’re leaving behind.
Forty days from now, we’ll walk across a stage, grab a diploma, and take a picture that will probably end up framed somewhere in our houses. People will says, “This is just the beginning,” and they’re right. But it’s also the end of something that mattered more than we realized while we were in it.
Right now, we’re in the middle. The countdown, the lasts, and the moments that don’t feel like they matter but will someday. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe high school was never just about the big milestones, but about everything in between.
So for the next forty days, I think the goal is simple: pay attention. Laugh a little more, stress a little less, and actually take in the moments as they happen. Because before we know it, this version of life will be over, and we’ll be looking back wondering how it all went so fast.
Forty days isn’t a lot. But it’s enough to realize just how much all of this meant.
