I’m a senior in high school who is moderately obsessed with Timothée Chalamet, desperate to go “where culture is…or where writers live in the woods,” and very into watching women kill it in the arts industry. In short, I’m pretty much exactly the person the box office of “Lady Bird” (2017), Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age masterpiece, was hoping would show up.

I saw the film in January. It was the month I was experiencing peak get-me-out-of-my-hometown-itis, discussing daily how ready I felt to leave Southborough, regardless of the memories and growth the town had allowed me. There’s just more to life, I thought, than Harry’s at midnight and walks around Breakneck Hill and falling asleep over homework in Panera. There is always more, and the future is so nice looking when it’s foggy!

Lady Bird got this. For her and I alike, the ambiguous future was an incredible refuge from high school stresses, struggles and insecurities. We didn’t know what tomorrow would hold, yes, but that made it all the more desirable. Because it could be perfect, couldn’t it?

But then the future comes, and Lady Bird finds herself in her dream city–New York–in the dreamiest situation–drunk at a college party. After a night of hospitalization, she leaves a voicemail for her mother, in which she asks, “Did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you…All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing.” The future comes, and Lady Bird finds herself missing a past where she was happy with the now.

I had a moment like this the other day, driving around Southborough with the windows of my car open, listening to a Podcast that was about a murder or getting out of your comfort zone or bread. There was nothing new about the roads, but they just felt so pretty, like they held something I’d missed, even after all these years in this town.

There are so many places to go and things to do and people to become, Class of 2022, and I am as thrilled as anyone for all this newness. But I hope that we can find, amidst our anticipation, a similar thrill for what we’ll be leaving, what we have currently. Lunchroom cookies. Surprise study halls. Four Chipotle runs in one week. Going 70 mph down Bartlett. Chauncy, Uhlman’s, childhood friends, the days we feel we can’t do anything and the nights we feel we can do everything.