I've officially begun the final semester of the MFA.

I am fond of final semesters.  At least, I remember the last semesters of both high school and college as being generally happy times.  There is something sweet about approaching the end, feeling accomplished and looking forward to the next thing.  The last semester I spent in high school was easy.  I spent two hours a day in a class called Senior Foods where I hung out with four other girls in a small home-ec kitchen, supposedly learning how to cook.  I wore a giant poofy dress to Prom that I adored and I really believed that even after we all went off to college and our separate ways that I would remain as close to my high school friends as I was the day we graduated.

Obviously it's wrapped up in a bit of nostalgic golden haze, but I stand by it, anyway.

And college.  Hands down it was the best semester- that last one- even working two jobs and feeling unsure of where I was going when it all wrapped up.  Much of college was fun, but that spring when the weather was turning warm and I was spending too many nights at the bar with my friends and barely making it to my 10am Spanish class was fun, everything coming together just before it was time to move on.  I felt hopeful.

It helps that I think about that time as a sort of blissful innocence, before I knew how ridiculously painful and long and dull and stressful getting a job would be.

This, right now, isn't the same.  For one, grad school isn't quite the rite of passage that high school and college are.  What I think of so fondly in those previous last semesters are my friends.  Classes were almost incidental.  I left both high school and college fairly optimistic, but I don't know that I'll leave grad school that way.  I'm a bit more jaded.  Cynical.  I know it's not easy to get a job, an MFA doesn't make it easier, and the writing?  The publishing?  Also hard.  Approaching the end, I'm finding myself much more anxious about losing the school, the work, the deadlines, the feedback, the required reading, the professors.  I've never really tried to be a writer without all of that.  Is it too soon to start freaking out about the real world?  Too soon to worry about what I'm going to tell people I'm doing without the easy and familiar answer of "oh, I'm a student"? 

(All of this leaving aside the fact that writing, MFA program or not, is a hard and long road that doesn't inspire natural optimism.)

Right now, in the moment, I feel much too busy and stuck in a ohmygod, thisisreallygoingtoend? kind of attitude to think I'll ever look back on this point with the kind of rosy vignette like view I give high school and college.  But maybe.  Check back with me in a few years.