This weekend I was in Virginia for my cousin's graduation from Roanoke Catholic.

I graduated from the same school ten whole years ago. I knew it had been that long, but it didn't really seem true until I was looking at the program for the ceremony and saw "Class of 2016" written on the front. Ten years! A full decade. What's most amazing to me about that isn't the time that has passed, but how easily it is to remember exactly how I felt back then.

Like anything was possible, but not really in an adventurous way. I grew up in Roanoke and loved my church and my school and was only going two hours away for college. I had been so predictable for so long, and I still wasn't sure if I wanted to be the same person or a different one.

I remember the exact dress I wore, and how my mom bought it for me when we were on vacation earlier that spring. I don't remember where we were but it was a gorgeous linen sundress that fit perfectly and made me feel like a grown-up--it's one of the few pieces of my wardrobe that I haven't gotten rid of over the years. The salesperson checking us out overheard us talking about graduation and asked me if I was excited about high school. I balked, wondering how young I actually looked as I told her that I was graduating from high school, not 8th grade.

I was dating someone but I was still in love with my ex-boyfriend, and both relationships were messy and confusing. I broke up with the boyfriend that summer before leaving for Longwood, and I remember feeling like I just needed to move on and I'd figure everything else out as soon as the fall semester started.

I tried, but there was a lot to figure out. So many new freedoms that I wasn't used to. My friend Wes texted me soon after I arrived on campus that first year and asked if I wanted to go to the park. "The park?" I replied, "It's 10 PM." He laughed at my surprise and we went to the park and sat on the swings, talking for hours, which quickly became a tradition of ours. It took me months to wear flip-flops to class, and I never did muster up the courage to chew gum in an academic building.

As I sat there in the church last Saturday, watching the excited faces of a class of 17 and 18 year-olds, I couldn't help but be astonished at how different my life is now than I thought it would be then. The friends I thought I'd know forever, the church I believed I'd always be a part of, the family business I would manage with my parents.

I didn't know that I would move so much, or that I would marry an incredibly tall, incredibly kind man who knows exactly who I am and makes me feel like I'm enough for him every single day (I think at the time I must have believed that the men--boys--in your life either drove you crazy or made you cry). I didn't know that I would battle anxiety with every transition I encountered in my life, or, more importantly, that when it comes you don't have to suffer silently through it without help. I didn't know that I'd make friends in college who would stick with me into adulthood, even when you've fallen out and think it's over.

And I didn't know that I'd one day be so comfortable with myself. Apparently ten years is enough time to grow up and become who you're really supposed to be.

I wouldn't change a thing.

This morning I'm headed to Charlottesville, Virginia for a couple days to visit my friend Patrick before he moves to Connecticut for a new job and to be reunited with his husband after a year of long-distance.

Charlottesville is such a special place to so many people I love--it was Patrick's home for ten years, where he met Chad and started a life together with him; it was where Shawna took a post-bac program before med school; it was where Rob and I first really lived together, on our own; and it was where I went through what I look back on now as one of the hardest times of my life--getting over the death of a childhood friend, dealing with depression and anxiety, modifying my diet in a life-changing way, finishing graduate school, wondering what could possibly be next.

But it was also one of the best times of my life--morning trail runs with my best friend, followed by farmer's markets or big pitchers of mimosas, afternoons spent paging through the University of Virginia's gorgeous libraries, living across the street from Patrick and Chad, working at a sweet little coffee shop, coming to the beautiful realization that Rob was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

And then, suddenly, it was time to go. We packed up our stuff and I dropped Rob off at the airport for a month-long school trip to China before a six-month stint training for his new job in DC. I headed back to my parents' house on the lake with no real plans for anything; missing Rob, missing Charlottesville, with no clear vision of the fun and amazing and love-filled life that was in store for us.

Lately I've been thinking about all the other "ends" in my life--some sad, some happy, some both--that were really just wonderful beginnings: The end of long-distance when I finally joined Rob in Minneapolis. My last day at a job I really thought I needed. The end of our time in Minnesota. And so many others. Almost nothing lasts forever--but your heart can break and mend and grow more than you ever thought possible.

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind." --C.S. Lewis

On Sunday morning I woke up to a drizzly rain and that fresh smell of air that whispers promises of spring.

I poured a cup of coffee and Ender and I went outside for a walk, where it suddenly dawned on me that I had never done this before--the warmer air, the rain, the coffee, this dog. We are on the precipice of a new season in a new city, once again, and that means so much to me--new memories to make and routines to establish, but this time with the feeling that we are possibly here to stay, not just passing through for one summer, one fall, one winter, one spring.

Spring has such a familiar smell and feeling--it reminds me of chilly April mornings in Charlottesville, where I worked as a barista every morning and drank iced coffee all day while I wrote my master's thesis from the old kitchen table we borrowed from my parents' basement. Sunscreen and Shawna and Patrick and Chad and Rob--I had such a little family of friends right there in the neighborhood. We went out to dinner and ran together and had so much coffee and the occasional bucket of mimosas on a porch somewhere. Looking back on it now feels like such a dream--so idyllic, so long ago, so far from reach.

But more than that, the beginning of spring reminds me of Roanoke, and sitting outside at the lake wrapped in a blanket with a cup of coffee in my hand. Of sweet Rocky frolicking about, even at the ripe old age of fourteen. Weekday sushi lunch dates with friends and entire Saturdays spent downtown, just wandering. Wet grass and that early morning haze, hovering above the lake's surface. Our life at Smith Mountain Lake was something I always hoped--but never actually attempted--to emulate in my own home.

Nostalgia has always been a big part of my life, but lately it feels like more of a crutch than a source of peace. My family is changing and my parents have plans to sell the dreamy house on the lake that I have used to create and then safeguard so many memories over the past ten years. So much of me is in that kitchen, the bookshelves, scattered around that big open living room, gathered around the table. While I know that our lives are not where our parents live, I've still been struggling with the new, blank canvas that is stretched out ahead of us.

At what point do we have to stop looking back for comfort and start creating something new to stand on? There will still be coffee and friends and family and my sweet husband to wake up next to and that smell of sunscreen on my skin after a warm day spent outside. It's a new place, a new season, a new opportunity; and it can be either scary or inspiring. I'm leaning toward the latter--finding the hope that lives at the bottom of most things and using it to move forward--both because I want to and because sometimes, I have to.