Going Away

The poster my friends made that I saw as I ran to the patio.

    And so we come to the night before I leave. The moment I will have tomorrow while boarding that plane will be the moment I was waiting for since a year ago. I'm starting to get mixed feelings about leaving. I'm not nervous for the trip but I'm anxious to be leaving home for this long. But I guess I'll have to say goodbye at one point. 

    What really marked my goodbyes was an AWESOME going away surprise party thrown by my amazing friends. On Friday, my dad and I had a day planned out for us. We would go down to my city's waterfront and meander around. At the end of all this we were going to go to a baseball game. (Little did I know our city's team wasn't even in the state that night...) At around 6:50 my dad got a phone call from my mom. As soon as he hung up he said "No game for us; the pool has a gash in it and it's leaking towards the house."

    So, this wasn't too surprising since our pool is on its last leg (and will probably be gone by next summer) so I believed it. So after a stressful twenty minute car ride of wondering if the pool would be okay, we finally pulled into the driveway. The few minutes before getting home I had been taking my shoes off and pulling my phone out of my pocket just in case I'd have to jump in the pool to plug the "gash" so I was ready. The car had barely stopped moving when I dashed out in a fury of superhuman-strength and then I sprinted along the path on the side of my house that leads to my patio. Halfway down the path I saw balloons and a sign...wha??? My first thought was that my mom was playing a joke on my dad that she didn't tell me about so I somehow knew the pool wasn't leaking so I kept -SURPRISE!- ohhhhh.............MY LORD. All of my best friends were standing in front of my now stunned self staring at my now confused face. I literally stopped dead and held the same mid-run position I had been moving in just a second ago for a moment. This just happened. I had just been the subject of a surprise party. So many feels. 

    So it turned out my pool was completely fine. And here I was standing like a completely oblivious fool in my back yard in front of twenty-two other humans but it was the greatest feeling ever. I had no clue this would happen at all. For about twenty minutes I just kept saying hi to more and more people that I didn't even notice were there because this was just too stunning to take in all at once. After getting over the fact that my friends just did the greatest thing to me, I actually started socializing (after twenty minutes of still being stunned and greeting everybody in a flabbergasted state of mind). The party went on with me surrounded by some of my favorite people in the world. All in all, Friday night could have passed for one of the happiest moments I've had in my life. I have the most amazing friends, and family for that matter. They planned this two weeks before with my neighbor Hannah and I had no clue! Very sneaky guys...very sneaky.

My friends and I gathered around the fire.

My favorite people :)