Our numbers are dwindling. Week by week, these desks become more vacant and dust lined. Professors and lecturers notice quickly, as their eyes dart and ping pong across empty chairs. Attached charts become flat spectrograms with only spikes of life. The diagnosis? Senioritis.

I am there, among those empty desks along with a handful of others. But yet, I can’t be hypocritical. There have been a few days that my desk lay bare, as I preferred to wallow in the despair of an ever dwindling sun that is my college life.

Many seniors may feel the same, or rather just fed up with the grind, a grind for most probably has been going on for over 20 years. For us graduating with bachelors and moving on into the work force, it is the end of our time in the halls of academia. The real world awaits.

Is it wrong to not finish strong? To want to perhaps limp and heave to the finish line? For some, we have had no break. Year after year, grade after grade, class after class, paper after paper. The grind, one we have done to trade in for a paper to allow us to enter a world of grinding and gritting.

I type this and linger on each keypress, wanting to savor the seconds I have left. Sure, I have applied for jobs, and sure, I have a rough idea of where to lay my weary head, but what of the empty desk next to me? Do they know? Do I truly know?

The 20’s have proved to be a time of turmoil and fear, or years in academia in this period have been highlighted by local and national stories that seem prime to make the brain boil into stew. Wars, genocides, lies and injustice. These are the background noise to yet another paper we have to submit, another exam to study for, another dusty tome to read.

Is it wrong to be exhausted in the final hour? Want to take a day or two to just breathe? I linger, here, on this page, and I wonder what my final thoughts will be when I grab that final paper and walk across the stage. I half expect the stairs down the stage to lead into a pit of oblivion, a void of unknowns.