Two weeks have gone by since my fellow classmate and I walked across that commencement stage in the center of Purchase, NY. 14 days have gone by, and life’s inevitable pace creeps forward, only pausing as if to tell each of us in it’s own unique way that “the time has come for your live’s to continue, so you must move or face being left behind.” This realization has left me to face a certain and inescapable inability that has befallen me. An inability to properly describe the sensation that pounds in my chest as I look retrospectively at these last 4 years has plagued me, and no amount of the passage of time has remedied this sensation or helped me to describe it. And as I have tried time and time again to form some semblance of an explanation for this sensation I have come to a single conclusive truth, a growing understanding that word’s may never be able to, at least to my mind and soul, describe what it is I am holding so dear. The moment’s that I have shared with these people that I have come to refer to as my “family” shaped and molded me, and although I did not realize the gravity of my “family’s” importance at the time, I look back almost surprised at how long of a road it has been to travel on, but certainly shocked at how suddenly said road came to it’s end. But this journey like all road’s, as all road’s must whenever it may be end, did exactly that. Yet as time progressed it was never a fear of an inevitable end that drove me to learn and grow, but rather a desire to live, to truly experience, amongst those I was blessed enough to hold space with. To which I say perhaps we held space, perhaps we did not, but certainly we chose to live. And live we did. With kindness and empathy, - D “As I look back, everything I did seems curiously deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate then.” - J. Baldwin