Si Ting Chen

For better or for worse, I am a deeply nostalgic person. But I didn’t realize this until quite recently, perhaps because I usually don’t enter bouts of nostalgia until everyone else falls asleep and I lie awake trying to do the same.

What made me realize this was watching “Wicked: For Good” in the theaters over Thanksgiving break, specifically when Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s performance of “For Good” almost brought me to tears.

As an avid theater-lover throughout my childhood, I always found the song to be rather cliché. I listened to countless performances of “For Good” sung by best friends before graduations. It was the stereotypical “theater song” that everyone could whip out the moment you heard the line, “I’m limited.” I never understood the appeal, if I’m being quite frank.

But something about this song hit me that day like it never had before. In the song, Glinda sings, “I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn. And we are led to those who help us most to grow if we let them, and we help them in return.”

Leaving the theater, I acknowledged that my emotions were not for the movie, but for a bigger reason that I would soon have to soon reckon with: the looming end to my time at Bowdoin. Throughout my senior year, I became hyperaware of the many lasts that I would have—the last Lobster Bake, the last Night at the Museum, the last drive up to Maine. Yet, I found myself most nostalgic not for the big moments but all of the little things, grown ordinary, that suddenly felt meaningful again as they were about to disappear.

So when I listened to “For Good,” primed by experiencing some of my first lasts already, I was moved by how much of my life at Bowdoin was shaped by the people who entered my life, often by chance, that made the little moments feel bigger. Many were even individuals that I would likely never see again after graduation, some that I barely see now, but that I still mourned the loss of.

In the many iterations of myself at Bowdoin, I shared hundreds of transient, yet formative, moments, now packaged into memories that live within the things I associated with them.

Nostalgia is “Pool House” by the Backseat Lovers that brings me right back to Coleman 403. It’s encountering a virtual fireplace on a TV. It’s playing “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” in the car. It’s seeing gluten-free Oreos in the grocery store. It’s when the clock hits 1:36 a.m. It’s all of the little things that I will never be able to stop associating with prominent moments and feelings that guided me through college—even the ones with sour endings I’m hesitant to reminisce about now.

My mother always tells me that everything happens for a reason, and while I dreaded this saying for most of my childhood, I have come to believe it’s true. Maybe it’s because of the opportunities, but maybe it’s because of the people we meet and the lessons we learn from them—no matter how long they stay in our lives.

We often only realize how meaningful the people around us are once those connections are on the brink of slipping away. I know once I leave Bowdoin, my current relationships will never be the same again. And maybe during “For Good,” I had come to realize that for the first time. But that doesn’t diminish the everlasting mark that they have left on me and all of the little things I associate with them. All of the people I’ve gotten the privilege of knowing will always be a part of me—in memories, in late-night nostalgia, in random objects—in moments that I will never get back but also will never forget.

Kaya Patel is a member of the Class of 2026.