Coming back to school feels weird. It always does. Summer is supposed to feel like a break from responsibilities. A few months of quietness where you don’t have to worry about deadlines, early mornings or studying for tests. You leave in June as one person and come back in August expecting to pick up where you left off. Same friend groups, same classes, same teachers, same routines. As if nothing changed while you were gone. 

But something did change. It’s not an obvious one, but it’s something that sits quietly at the bottom of your heart. You realize that this is the last year you’ll ever have a summer break like this. The last ‘cliché’ first day of school. The last time you’ll return after months away and see all your friends again, immediately getting to catch up on what everyone did during summer and complaining about how early you have to wake up again. 

For seniors, this was our last summer break. People will still have warm summer evenings and late sunsets, and days where you lose track of what time it is. There will still be summers waiting for everyone at the end of the year. But they won’t be quite like a classic summer break like this one.  

You’ll never again have a summer where your only responsibility is to enjoy not having them. You’ll never again have that feeling of knowing that school is waiting for you, but it can’t reach you yet. There’ll obviously be other summers, but they’ll belong to different versions of your life. That’s why coming back to school feels so weird for so many seniors right now. 

We walk into the same school we’ve walked into countless times before, pass the outdated posters on the walls, complain about teachers, sit in classrooms having staring contests with the clock, and wonder why school days somehow feel both endless and incredibly short. We’re so used to counting down to the next thing that we rarely stop to realize when something is happening for the last time. We spend years waiting for summer, for graduation, to be older, only to realize that some of the things we were so desperate to leave behind are the things we would eventually give anything to experience again.