The other night I was miles above some city, standing on an elevator without walls. It was windy, and before I woke up from this nightmare, I teetered on the edge of the platform, then fell.

"You're just anxious," my mom said. "Aren't you excited to finally be done school?"

For the past week, I've had this hollow feeling in my stomach, nestled somewhere between butterflies and a knot. I'm waking up in a panic hours before my alarm, thinking something outlandish -- Someone's on the porch, I missed my final exams, I showed up to work and got fired the first day...

It's as though my center of gravity has been thrown off, my world upside down.

I'm graduating, and somewhere, sometime, I'll be elated -- but for now I just can't shake the fact that I'm about to cross into unknown territory.

I'm spending time silently cataloging photos inside my mind, thinking about when I'm 80, wondering if I'll remember this as the best time in my life ... and worrying about how much I'm going to miss this place. I just got really good at being a college student, and now I have to master how to be an adult, which doesn't sound nearly as fun.

It's a far cry from where I was four years ago.

I was a Pennsylvania high school brat, convinced that Penn State was 13th grade and begging my parents to let me go somewhere else. I scoffed as we drove by farms and cows, openly despising the school, the colors and the stereotype of going where many people from my high school went.

Up until that day, I had never even heard of a Nittany Lion.

A few months later I was in State College, homesick, stubborn and attached to memories from high school.

That year was a rollercoaster, too -- I cried when I was dropped off, sinking into the corner of my empty, stuffy dorm room and watching my parents drive away, both of them sniffling. I cried again when I was picked up, not wanting to leave that place, where my friends lived two doors down, where I had unknowingly grown attached.

Both times I was uprooted. When I had finally developed a groove, it seemed as though it was time start the process over; time to replant roots in a new place.

Four years later, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when I started calling this place home. It's strange to think that we won't be coming back here, and that when we move out, it's for good. Will we still call Penn State home, even after we've started our new jobs? And how long will it take for us to find a nook without the cradle of college?

In this limbo, this shaky, suspended platform, it's hard to think clearly about the past or the future. I can't fully appreciate the past until I'm removed from it, and I can't think about the future without thinking of some idiotic "last" -- Is this the last time I'll be in a classroom? Is this the last time I'll write a term paper? Is this the last time I'll eat a ham sandwich in my living room on the third Friday of the month?

So, in the meantime, what we have left is the present -- a notion so fleeting that we have to just live in it, not think about it, but just live in it.

We might be stuck in limbo, but we're brought together under the advancing concept of change, hungry to hang on to the last moments before we leave.

Maybe we don't know what the future holds, and maybe it is a middle ground that we seniors aren't quite ready to walk.

But there is a silver lining -- we have the next two weeks to be college students, untouched by the world around us, content to live in the bubble of Happy Valley for the last time.

And, for the next 80 years, we'll have the memories.