While walking around London this past weekend, I was punched in the gut by an overwhelming sense of premature nostalgia. I imagined myself in three months missing England with that familiar ache of missing something you know you will never get back exactly as it was. Nothing preceded this ache—I just had the overwhelming sense that I will miss it when I’m gone. If I do get back to England one day, it will not be in the same circumstances as this past year abroad, a time where the real world seemed both more distant and persistent than ever before. This wasn’t the first time I’d become nostalgia for no tangible reason, but with only one term left at Oxford the prospect of leaving becomes realer every day.

To be honest, this has been going on for a while. Freshman year was okay: I still had three years plus being abroad left, but by the time I was a sophomore the insistent bleating of my future was already audible. It’s not just fear of losing the friends I’ve made here, of having to leave the Bodleian Library and all its books, of no longer being able to get into London in an hour and a half. It’s the knowledge that once I go back to Dickinson I only have about eight months to pretend I don’t have to know what a mortgage is.

I read a lot of articles on Thought Catalog about being a twenty-something and not knowing where your life is going. They tend to be pithy and written in the kind of self-referential mocking tone typical of that website, but they do make me feel better about the times I’m crippled with anxiety about what post-limestone life looks like. It feels a bit disingenuous to be reliving the past when it hasn’t even happened yet, but that seems to be the way my brain works.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but is it too early for a junior to be worrying about graduation?

I can’t think about the future too much because it makes me feel unsure and alienated, but that doesn’t mean I don’t plan. I have goals and aspirations in life (really, I do!) but for so long they seemed distant, part of some odd and liminal place called adulthood. It’s important to remember that I used to lump college into the same category though, and we all know how quickly that comes and goes. That doesn’t stop me from wishing the earth could orbit the sun a little slower, though.

I’ll miss the hills and valleys and cities of England, and I’ll miss the social awkwardness of the British as a whole, but these aren’t the reasons for my nostalgia. I suppose I can’t even call it that because my time in England hasn’t completely passed yet, but I can’t help but feel its emergence after every day gone by. Maybe my anxiety about the future, my fear of leaving England, my unwillingness to admit that I will soon be a senior all stem from the same longing for stability and simplicity. I sometimes miss high school if only because days were so regimented; you always knew where the hours went, however torturously slow they crawled.

I think I’ll most miss what I’ve become here though. Abroad hasn’t transformed me, despite the propaganda Global Ed perpetuates. However, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure my life out and I’m glad for the time and experience of studying in such a different atmosphere. There’s nothing I can do to stop worrying, but I’ll try to regret as little as possible when I leave. There might even still be time to finally learn the metric system, too.