Thank you for the Friday night car rides, where I learned just as much about myself as I learned about you. Thank you for those late nights spent smiling and bickering about the silly things in life. Thank you for being my tutor, my friend, my inspiration.

I don’t say “thank you” enough to the people I care the most about. I don’t think these people know how much I appreciate them for being in my life. Simple words can have such a lasting effect on a relationship. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. I’ll miss you.

I should have said these words to someone very important to me when he went off to college. I remember the last time I saw him was on a Saturday, near his dorm. Our goodbye wasn’t even a proper one, just a wave and then a walk away. Even though I would see him again four months later, he never stayed long. He had moved on from our suburban house and become adjusted to the big city.

I wish I had said goodbye, Armin.

Goodbye to the times when you would wake me up at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday to listen to those “sick beats” that weren’t actually so sick. Goodbye to your cooking, which was always better than what mom made. Goodbye to your phone calls, waking me up at 1 a.m. to sneak you inside the house, after you spent the night partying.

My biggest regret is not saying this word.

Goodbye.

I should have said it — you deserved to hear them. But I didn’t say them. Every time I think about it, I could made that moment have so much more of an everlasting impact. Sadly, my 15-year-old brain process the consequences of this yet.

As my time at MVHS comes to a close, I know it’s time to say goodbye. But this time, I am not making the same mistake that I made with him. I am not the same shallow 15-year-old — I am now a cringey 17-year-old. So things will become different this time around.

When I first entered high school in 2013, I can’t explain to you how much I wanted to leave. I hated everything — the classes, the food, the people. My lunch came from food trucks, and I wasn’t even five feet tall. I felt out of place. I just wanted to go back to simpler times back in Kennedy, back to when I didn’t have to spend every lunch in Biology. And it didn’t help that after my first ever high school finals, I found out I had a myxoma in my right tricuspid valve.

To briefly sum it up, my first four months in MVHS were terrible.

But  even  if joke I about wanting to die a bit more than I should, I am glad that I did not die on the operating table on April 18, 2014. Because then, I wouldn’t have been able to see the good aspects of MVHS that I will be leaving behind.

While I was recovering in the spring, my friends brought me a poster that my AVID class had made. The poster said “Feel better!” surrounded by all their signatures and Pokémon cards. To this day, it is still hanging on the wall next to my desk. This one act of kindness compelled me to continue the class for the remainder of high school.

In the fall semester of 10th grade, my friends decided to make the greatest club in the world, Philosophy Club. This club gave me the opportunity to meet some great underclassmen. These were the first students from the class of 2018 I had the pleasure of meeting, and I am glad they were.

On the first day of 11th grade, I met a particular senior in my AP Biology class. He was one of the best tennis players in the nation and even though I am not a sporty guy, we had a lot in common. We would spend all of our time in class watching movies and screwing around during the labs.

And this year, I joined journalism. I thought it would be a little too late to join and, at first, I felt out of place. But because I stuck to it, I met some of the best people, all of whom I am glad to call close friends.

The people I’ve met over the past three years shaped the person I became.

But it is time to say goodbye to MVHS. I may still be able to see all these people, but it’ll never be the same. I won’t see them in my seventh period class. I won’t be watching movies with them. I won’t be working on stories at late nights with them. I’ll have to graduate and move on from this.

I sometimes think of classes and my time differently in high school. But I know, I have to move on. I know I will always have these people with me. I am only leaving the school, not the people, but I worry. I worry that I’ll lose them to time. I worry that without this school holding us together, we’ll stop talking all together.

But I won’t let that happen.

This is a goodbye to our school lives together, but not our time together. Even when I leave Monta Vista, those memories won’t leave, just like it was with Armin. It’s time I stop living with regrets, and it starts now.

Thank you, I love you, I’m sorry, I’ll miss you.

Goodbye.