It finally snowed in early December. As soon as it snowed, all the colors disappeared. The garnet-red school buildings, the tree trunks that hadn’t lost all their leaves, the grass that mixed dark green and yellow, all turned white at once. It’s always hard for me to remember what things originally looked like when everything turns white, and the white scenery is also the most familiar impression I have of this place. Over the past three months, I’ve been informing my friends and professors that I’m graduating early; I don’t really like to talk about it because every time I bring it up, I feel like the separation is closer. Most people smiled, congratulated me, and asked if I felt excited. I always shake my head and say: Actually no, I just feel that time is going too fast.
It really is.
As an international student in the class of 2024, I spent my entire freshman year online; coming to school in my sophomore year, I wasn’t as familiar with the campus as a freshman who had gone through orientation. I didn’t know any people, and I didn’t even know where my classrooms were. By my junior year, I had made more friends and felt a sense of familiarity and closeness with this place, and it was a happy and fulfilling year.
Then my senior year came, and because I chose to graduate early, the fall 2023 semester was my last at Bates. Naturally, it became very busy. In the blink of an eye, it was already time to really say goodbye. I had only been on campus for two and a half years, and compared to normal college life, my pace seemed to be on double speed.
This small city is so quiet that sometimes I feel isolated; walking across the bridge connecting Lewiston and Auburn, I feel as if the wind can’t wrinkle the tranquility of this place. Spring and summer come so late here that I barely see them; so, I always feel new to green Lewiston when I come back in September. Soon it comes to fall, and often the leaves turn color within a week or less, and then a fall rain will bring them down. When winter comes with heavy snowfalls, I love to watch the snow froth swirling under the streetlights, and it is most calming to look out the window when the world is all silver and white.
In the past, I always complained that the melting snow water was too troublesome, and the dark nights of winter were too long; but these days I can’t help stopping to take a picture of the tree I actually pass by every day. It is always said that one’s reluctance is strongest only when it is time to part, but what am I reluctant to part with? It might be the time I spent here, or the nights studying hard, or the friends enjoying life together, or even the fruit pizza that Commons only has once in a while, or just a falling leaf in the fall. I’ve only seen two years of snow in Lewiston, and I am leaving when the third year’s snow falls.
