4 years

Sometimes we aren't the people we used to be and sometimes we grow into better, stronger individuals. Sometimes the person people see on the outside isn't at all who we are in our hearts and in our minds. Sometimes we become someone different, someone that finds a moment and holds it tight, someone that loses parts of yourself but someone that also finds everything they ever wanted.

Life isn't about the moments we waste, it's about the moments we take and use and create. It's about what we find and what we chase, and who we become when the dust of childhood settles onto adulthood. It's about finding that passion in your heart, that fire that burns and that incredible movement within your soul and it's about becoming who you are, and leaving behind the parts of you that weren't so great.

We are here to live our lives, to breathe and pray and love and to find our spirits and to hold hands and to embrace. We are here to smile and to laugh, and to walk along the beach with our feet in the water. We are here to sit alone in the dark and think, to watch as our family comes together and to write. We are here to follow our dreams, to look up at the Eiffel Tower and know that someday you will be there, to look out the window and smile. We are here to live this life we have, to find our faith in whatever in whatever it may be and we are here to become the people we never used to be.

I am not the same person I was four years ago, and I don't hardly any of you are either. And in those four years, we have found a new dream, a new love, a new life. We have become those young men and women of our futures and we have found that life is more than proms and parties. It's more than varsity football games and it's more than just a pretty face. Life is a collection of moments, it's about falling in love and coming home to something. It's about having our own places and our own careers, it's about waking up and knowing that you are chasing after every dream you've ever had and knowing that no matter what happens down the road, you are a stronger, more intelligent, more beautiful person than you were four years ago when nothing else mattered.