It’s February of my senior year, and it’s pretty much going as I expected. The thing that has surprised me, though, is that for that as long as I’ve coveted this moment, and as relentlessly as I’ve chased it down for the past four years, I am somehow caught by a sense of unease now that I’m facing it so closely. In four months, high school will be over. Now that I know just how quickly that time will go by, I can’t help but wonder if I really made the most of it all. This was High School: the time in our lives that all the TV shows and movies are about. My life has looked nothing like those CW dramas and Disney Channel Original Movies. And I’m seventeen, but I have yet to establish myself as the dancing queen. Did I mess it up somehow? Should I have been having more fun all along and doing less… babysitting and homework and track practice?

Because... if I have monumentally screwed it up, now would be the time to do something about it. These last four months will be the ones I remember more than anything else. There’s still time for me to become the Brooke Davis or Blair Waldorf that I always imagined myself becoming back in my childhood of more limited understanding and unsupervised TV-14-rated show marathons.

Yet the feeling I now know all too well—the nostalgia for the present moment as though it’s already gone, the voice reminding me that these-will-be-the-good-old-days loitering in the back of my mind—have sprung from none other than my own experiences. When I walk to class in school, I already miss the faces that I see around me, not the ones I saw on television ten years ago. I feel a pang when I tell people that “I’m a senior” and where I’ll be going next year because it won’t be here. That mysterious longing comes from my own four years: the awkward lunches; the small talk in the girls’ bathroom; the early September days without air conditioning; the many, many sober Saturday nights; the fire "drills" which we weren’t sure were actually drills because our school was in such terrible condition; the babysitting instead of partying; the lack of teen pregnancy in my grade (not even a scare); the pages of Sparknotes; the bus rides to soccer games in October when it would start getting dark far too early. I haven’t had many romantic narratives to tell in high school; my sophomore year was like one unending, unfunny episode of Parks and Recreation (uncomfortable, though you’re not really sure why, and dramatic where you’d least expect it); it hasn’t been glamorous or envy-inducing or even really that angsty. It's been whatever they leave out of the songs and movies. It’s been high school. Normal, mundane, American public high school. And even then, somehow, at some point along the way, I let myself believe that it would be like this forever.

But my graduation date in on the calendar now. My eighteenth birthday isn’t too far away. I just finished my last round of midterm exams. It is coming to a close, even though the kids in the grade below us seem too young to be rising seniors and the college students I see on social media seem like they should still be sophomores and juniors in high school. For how long some of those weeks dragged on, it sure has gone by fast—yes, I know it’s been relatively boring; and yes, I know the next four months probably won’t be any different.

But somehow, when I asked my mom if she ever got nostalgic for her high school years in Washington, D.C., the sensation her answer incited in me still makes sense, in spite of the striking normalcy of these years:

She offered me a wistful smile and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Every spring.”

I nodded, and something in my chest softened. Something very strong told me that I’ll miss Providence in the spring too.