Endings and Goodbyes

I wrote a lot of drafts for this speech, but the one that stuck with me the most was the first. That first draft wasn’t anything exceptional or inspirational, or even unique. It was just me plagiarizing Lord of the Rings, reading out Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday goodbye speech to anyone who hadn’t yet tuned out, before trying to figure out how to vanish from the stage in a puff of smoke. For those of you who may not have been as obsessed with Lord of the Rings as I was (and still somewhat am), Bilbo Baggins gives a speech at his 111th birthday party during which he insults the majority of those in attendance before leaving his comfortable life behind yet again. It was a story I played out in my head for years, years before I even got close to graduating middle school. But by the time I graduated middle school, I forgot my plans that had been years in the making in favor of a short, cliched address where I talked about meeting my friends, and how that tied into the values of the school.

That isn’t to disparage my previous speech, if you liked that, pretend I’m saying that instead.

And then I started ninth grade, and remembered the mental image of myself, standing in front of a crowd, and tying a bow on my highschool career. Now to understand this fantasy better, I should explain a few things about myself. I’m terrible at goodbyes, and I hate endings. So it always fit in my head, that when I needed something to say for the biggest ending of my life up until that point, I would quote the speech that for me had grown to define an ending, and better yet, an ending that wouldn’t leave me a sobbing mess. That’s because Bilbo’s goodbye speech isn’t actually entirely an ending. While it’s the ending of Bilbo’s story, it’s at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first book in the—frankly quite daunting—Lord of the Rings series. It was also the beginning of Frodo’s adventure. I hated endings, but this was a way for me to imagine that nothing was going to actually end.

Every time a chapter of my life has closed, I’ve heard people saying that it’s not actually an end, that I shouldn’t be sad, but be happy that it happened. Maybe that’s another part of why I gravitated towards Bilbo’s speech for graduation: because despite what everyone always said, I always knew that this was going to be an ending. So many of the patterns that made up my years as I attended this school are going to have to change, and they’re probably never going to be the same again. I needed to look to something that was enough of an ending that I could see it as such, that I wouldn’t feel as though I was lying and saying things wouldn’t change dramatically, but at the same time enough of a beginning that I could bear to face it. It fit perfectly in my head.

But, as I worked through the drafts of this speech, close reading my every thought about the similarities between Bilbo and myself, the more I saw the differences as well. (Beyond the surface level) When Bilbo gives his speech, he vanishes into a puff of smoke and never returns. With the exception of a few of our protagonists, none of the people he was speaking to ever see him again. And he was only saying goodbye because he had to, not because of any attachment he had towards his audience. That’s not what I’m doing here, and certainly not what I hope to come from this evening. So maybe Bilbo wasn’t the perfect role model after all. Because, he’s saying goodbye more than marking an ending. This is an ending, but it isn’t a goodbye.

Life isn’t like the stories I always focused on. And this is an ending, an ending of a spectacular chapter of our lives, but hopefully also the beginning of something equally remarkable. Just because some parts of what made this group so special are going to end, we can still hold those bonds together, just because some things are going to shift, not everything has to. But this is an ending, so I’m going to end this speech with a quote that I don’t think quite sums up this moment anymore, but then again I’ve spent about five minutes trying at this point so if I had one quote that could I would have to apologize for wasting all your time. Also my fourth grade self might just invent a time machine just to kill me if I didn’t say it.

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” Thank you, for an ending that’s not quite what I thought it could be, but closer to what it should.