Eyes on the road, but my mind in a different place, I pull into the driveway of my house and think to myself “how did I get here?”. How could I have possibly arrived home in one piece? It was as if one moment I was getting in my car to leave and the next minute I was home. While my foot pressed the gas and my hands were on the wheel, my mind was elsewhere, thinking about anything but driving, from the derivative formulas I needed to memorize for calculus to where I would go to dinner over the weekend.

It’s a sensation. A strange, indescribable feeling of time passing by, but in a way in which you don’t feel it happening. You’re just there and everything is moving, but you feel like you’re standing still.

Somewhere in between all the car rides to school, the late nights watching episodes of “Friends” in between homework assignments, and weekends driving around this bubble we call Bloomfield, we all grew up. I feel the same, no older than last year or the year before, but everything around me has changed. How did we get here, to being second semester seniors, ready to move on to bigger things? Weren’t we just fourteen, having our parents drop us off at the mall?

It’s not just that these past four years have gone by fast, but in between all of the late nights and early mornings, I didn’t even realize how much time was passing by. Wishing I could remember it all, I try to think back and figure out when I grew up, to figure out at what moments in my life made me who I am today, because sometimes it feels as if it was just recently that I was walking out of freshman orientation about to start high school, unknowing of everything I would learn over the next four years.

Everything seemed to go in the blink of an eye, and in that instant where my eyes were shut, I missed something. Here I am, a high school senior, eighteen years old, with more than I know of, but with so much more to learn and experience.

These past four years were slow and fast all at the same time. And now that the road is coming to end, and soon enough we will be walking across the stage at commencement, all I can think is “how on Earth did we get here?”.