Jonny Roach- Staff Writer

The page looks the same as it always does: blank, waiting, familiar. I’ve sat here before, more times than I can count, chasing a first sentence that never feels right until it suddenly does. It’s routine now, almost muscle memory. But this time, something’s off. Not in the words, not in the process, but in what this really is. 

This isn’t just another article. It’s my last one. And for something that’s supposed to mean that much, it feels exactly the same. No weight. No pause. No moment where everything slows down and asks to be understood. It moves the way every ending always has. Quietly, without announcement, without asking to be noticed. I think that’s why it’s so easy to miss. 

Image courtesy of Latoya Simms

The moments that matter almost never arrive as moments. They slip in disguised as routine, something you’ve done before, something you assume you’ll do again. I knew the last time I walked out of my first-year dorm room that it would become a memory instead of a place. I knew the last time I stepped off Coulter Field in shoulder pads would mark the end of my days playing competitive sports. But those were the easy ones to recognize. 

The times I might miss the most were never that obvious while they were happening. I think about traditions like walking the arches, sipping a drink made by Bishop’s brewing students, or the last time I heard “we’re going to Animal House tonight.” They were like stepping into spaces that felt so constant they almost seemed permanent, but they never told me when they were finished. They just faded, quietly, into something I now find myself holding onto without realizing when I started. 

The Bishop’s experience didn’t arrive all at once. It built slowly, in layers I didn’t see forming. The same people, the same places, the same rhythm, until it stopped feeling temporary and started feeling like something I could rely on. Like something that would still be there tomorrow. Most of the time, it was. Until it wasn’t. 

I’ve spent the past year writing about the Bishop’s moments that demanded attention, like big games, major events, the kind of memories you can picture in real time as they’re happening. Yet, the ones I keep coming back to now aren’t those, but the ones that never felt significant as they were happening. The in-between moments. Like stopping to say hi to someone on your way back from class. Moments I didn’t think twice about while I was in them. That’s what I wasn’t ready for. Not that this would end, but that it would end so quietly. 

No final moment that holds it all together. No clear line between being in it and looking back on it. Just a slow shift, where something that felt like everyday life becomes something you can’t step back into the same way again. I think, if anything, that’s what I’ve learned to hold onto. Not the idea of trying to make every moment matter, but the understanding that they happened every day, even if I couldn’t see it. Even when I thought there would be more time, because there isn’t a version of this where I get to do it over. There’s only this one, exactly as it happened: unfinished in places, imperfect in others, but real in a way that only something lived through can be. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s what makes it worth holding onto in the first place. Not because it’s over, but because it happened.