End of an Era

I just finished watching the final episode of ER and I'm sitting here with tears streaming down my face. Not because the show was that sad, and not because I'm going to miss it. Heck, I haven't watched it regularly since the 1999-2000 season, and I don't think I've watched it at all since 2002 or 03. But for my whole adult life it's been there...somewhere in the background. And tonight when I watched the finale and the special beforehand, it brought me back to college.

Freshman year we had a Thursday night schedule that never varied. Crammed during dinner, took an exam from 7:00-8:00 (at my University, most large lecture classes scheduled exams outside of class during the evenings), watched Friends to relax, did Calculus homework in a group because it was always due Friday morning, and then watched ER. Every single week. The next three years of Thursdays were pretty similar, minus some of the exams, plus some beer as we got older.

I stopped watching ER regularly a couple of months after I graduated and moved to Western NY all by myself. The first round of regular characters had left the show, I just wasn't as into it, and it was making me way too tired on Fridays. You can't sneak a nap in between classes when you're working. So almost all of my mental associations to ER link back to college. And although that seems like just a couple of years ago, I've been out of school almost a decade. If you had asked me in high school or college or even just after graduation, I would have never imagined my life being this.

So I'm not crying because ER is over. But I am crying because that part of my life is over. I'm crying for the things I didn't do for whatever stupid reason that seemed so important at the time. I'm crying for the wasted time I can't get back. I'm crying for friends I have lost touch with, who I will never be as close to again. I'm crying for the dreams I had that didn't happen, and crying in thankfulness that this life happened instead.