Alive to watch it all, the view through our last summer

Blame it on impending autumn, but I'm feeling nostalgic. Not the nostalgia of the middle aged mother looking back fondly on her whimsical days of youth; I'm pretty sure I'm too young for that right now, considering I'm experiencing now the very youth I'll be looking fondly back on in a few decades. More like the nostalgia of someone who knows their life won't be stagnant for very long. When you're a teenager, nothing stays the same for any considerable length of time. You're always going on to new things, or watching other people go on to new things, or preparing for the next step on that metaphorical staircase of Becoming An Adult. You have friendships that you're convinced will last you through the years, but drift after several months. So you get nostalgic about things that happened only a year ago, because to you, that seemed like a heck of a lot longer ago than it does to say, someone who's 53.

I'm not even sure if my current state of mind can be called nostalgia. I'm just in one of those rare and odd moods where I suddenly want everyone I'm close to to know exactly how much they mean to me and the impact they've had on my life, before everything changes again and they go off to new and better things. I know things aren't going to stay the same, so it only seems logical that I make sure that I don't leave anyone in any doubt of their worth in my eyes, before I don't have the chance to tell them anymore. There's a reason I fight distance, time constraints, teasing, and the occasional maternal prejudice to keep up my relationships.

Last year I fulfilled this sort of mood by writing some of my departing senior friends "love notes" about what I appreciated about them. I'm not thinking that'd pan out right now because A) that doesn't include my considerable number of non-college bound friends and B) a good portion of the college-bound ones have already left. So I'm guessing this limited edition Sappy Linda is just going to go to bed, get up for school, and hitch her proverbial skirt up for the next mini-step on that metaphorical staircase without any heartfelt, romantic-comedic-esque revelations.

But, if you're reading this, chances are high that I love you, and I'd like you to know that.