When You're Not Prepared

There are harsh certainties in life that we know are coming, no matter how much we'd like to pretend they aren't. Our parents grow older. Our pets cross the rainbow bridge. Our nests become empty. But one eventuality I never expected was to see the place that shaped me into who I am...not exist anymore. That I wasn't ready for.

Due to financial mismanagement by a clown administrator and an inept board of trustees, Birmingham-Southern College, the campus I called home for four instrumental years, is closing its doors forever in a few days. They've had closing events and decommissioning ceremonies, but it doesn't seem real to me.

Birmingham-Southern was only 80 miles from the home I grew up in, but it might as well have been a million miles away. I remember writing an essay about the diversity I'd experienced there, and my professor smeared bright green ink all over my paper, citing how not diverse the campus actually was. But for an 18 year old kid who'd never been around people from other countries, it seemed exotic to hear other languages being spoken. I'd never seen someone wearing a sari or a hijab, except in TIME magazine. Granted, she was statistically right, but it was wildly different there from my little hometown.

I made lifelong friends on that campus. We have gone through life's joys and sorrows together. I text these friends almost every single day. We physically shared living spaces back then, and virtually share our lives with each other now. We feel real grief in knowing that the place that brought us together is about to be gone. I couldn't bring myself to go to the sorority tea that signals the end of ZTA at BSC. (Or any of the other closing events. It's just too much.)

I stopped by the campus a few years back to get transcripts for a job. I marveled at the changes in the landscape of the place. There were buildings where there used to be roads. There were roads to places that used to be trees. It was basically unrecognizable. But the heart of BSC was never just the campus. It was the security guards who would come jump off your car battery when you forgot to turn the lights off. ("226-4700--Security is your friend," they taught us at orientation.) It was having a group of friends to sit with in the cafeteria, where the sweet lady at the register called you "sugar." It was having coffee with your professor on the dorm quad on a random Tuesday night after he played his guitar in the coffeehouse. It was late night dinners in Pizza Hut with your best friends. It was your advisor helping you plan your future, but also caring that your roommate was a psycho. It was the beautiful ginkgo trees that periodically smelled like 10,000 rotting corpses. It was President Neal Berte calling you by name and asking how your parents were doing. It was a million little things that made the whole experience the best years of my life.

And just like that, it's going to be gone forever. And I'm still not prepared to say goodbye.

"Forward, Ever: BSC."

Always.