The first version I wrote of this column was unapologetically sarcastic, an exercise in self-mockery that used the phrase “this is SO college” as refrain and lamented the lack of both Nietzsche and Natural Light in my life next year. It was reflective of what I found easiest to say and what, I figured, an audience of equally sarcastic and sentiment-avoiding Wash. U. students would want to hear on an occasion with palpable significance.

To be honest, this is something I’m ashamed of. If there is one thing that characterizes our generation, it may very well be this love of irony, this dull, hip avoidance of our emotions. Over the past four years, I’ve watched as my friends and I respond, over and over again, to serious life questions with cynical quips and eye-rolls. This is easy and amusing, yes, but it’s also avoidant.

When I left for college four years ago, I continuously maintained that goodbyes were an unnecessary and dramatic exercise. In my mind, the pang of leaving something I loved was going to happen regardless of whether or not I acknowledged it verbally. I held this position fervently, until I was sitting alone, cross-legged on my brand new extra-long twin comforter in a dorm room filled with boxes, and opened the letter that my best friend had handed me shortly before we left. It said everything I had been afraid to say: The fear that things will never again be the same, the meaning contained within collective memories of a time and place.

Another high school friend of mine is fond of saying “It’s not ‘goodbye,’ it’s ‘see you later.’” In an age of text-message groups, Twitter and Skype, this may very well be the case. But substituting “goodbye” for “see you later” conveys the idea that our opportunities to be sentimental will be infinite. The thing that is hardest about using the word “goodbye,” really using it, is that it acknowledges that these opportunities are limited.

About a week ago, two of my friends and I rode our bikes to the Arch late at night under an uncharacteristically cold April sky. We stood on top of fluorescent lights and waved at our shadows in the stainless steel—steel that reflects, too, the light of the boats on the Mississippi, boats that move back and forth in currents, even when they are anchored down.

For me, my shadow was a reminder that our impressions of time and place are fleeting, always, despite our most concerted attempts to make them stand still. And as the wind off the river whipped our hair, the symbolism couldn’t have been clearer: Sometimes what we need most is, simply and sincerely, to reflect.

The older I get, the more fervently I believe that a real awareness of our movements in life ought to be the thing that defines us. Perhaps it means writing a letter to say goodbye, or even taking a second to watch our shadows. In any case, there is meaning and significance for us in May 2011—we’ve known this all along. The sensible thing, it would seem, is to say our goodbyes, and to say them well.