When I started at this high school four years ago, following trying to become one with the wall in middle school, more than half of my peers were strangers. I have spent the last four years of my life inadvertently finding less and less of them to be.

When I first stepped through the doors, I was a relatively shy, quiet kid, and while some people still receive that more reserved version of me, plenty of people would call you mad if that’s how you described me. But that transition from shy and quiet to someone whose voice goes above a mumble could not have possibly happened without newspaper. 

I originally had no plans to be in newspaper. I wanted to be in yearbook, which thank god that didn’t happen because I quite possibly might be the worst photographer to grace this staff in a while or maybe ever. But I picked newspaper, transferring in on the second day of my sophomore year because newspaper was the one I had a friend in, and I needed a tech credit.

At the time I simply had no idea that newspaper would be where so many of my friends to come would be from. 

There were Sofia Hughes, Harrison Melton (my namesake), and Kaitlin Green who worked to draw me out of my shell, even if none of them are around anymore. 

Now there are Ava, Rhylan and Isaac who hear me go on about nonsense every morning. Yes Rhylan, Harry Styles is going to commit a cancellable offense — I just know it. 

Then there’s the full staff of people whose names will all be in the back of this issue who I love dearly but there are too many of you to list here. 

And of course Mrs. Huss who watched me go from 21st Century Journalism where I didn’t speak to it being a miracle when I’m quiet in the morning during editors’ hour. Truly, thank you, for giving me a place to discover having a voice.

A gap was bridged in between that time where I grew as a person — maybe it was the care of people around me to not let me fade away into the background, maybe it was giving myself a voice by always having an opinion to write about or maybe it was just that I stopped being a stranger to myself and stopped letting so many people be strangers to me.

There are a million heartbreaks and a million joys you will go through in a lifetime — sometimes there are a hundred of each in one day — but you do not have to go through either alone, and honestly after experiencing the care of the people on this staff and those I’ve made friends with outside of this, why would you want to?

And so I, with the rest of you, stand at a crossroads, surrounded by people I’ve known for years, and some I may never have even spoken a word to. 

There are some of you whose lives I have already been deeply intertwined with for years, and whose lives I will probably be a part of as long as we are both on this Earth. There are some of you I may fall out of touch with but who I will still reminisce about when my hair is gray. There are some of you I may stumble across a decade from now, my name will escape you and your name will escape me, and we’ll both wonder if that’s the person we were thinking of. And there are some of you who I may never see again after graduation.

So, if years from now you find yourself in some dingy place and think for a second you recognize me by laugh alone, please don’t be a stranger.