6 — Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

I’m not going to compare my 

college graduation to the series 
finale of a TV show.

It’s common knowledge that 

everyone who likes TV sees their 
own life as a TV show. We see 
ourselves as the protagonist of 
an indie movie, complete with 
romantic subplots and a built-in 
coming-of-age narrative. If you’re 
a person who watches a lot of TV, 
it’s impossible to avoid looking at 
graduation — whether it’s from 
high school or college or med 
school or anything — as a series 
finale of sorts.

That’s how it was for me 

during my senior year of high 
school, anyway. I knew relatively 
early on where I’d be going to 
college the following year, and 
that allowed me to experience 
most of the year as sentimentally 
as possible. I hung out with my 
friends all the time, savoring the 
time I had left with them. I wrote 
heartfelt notes on the back of 
wallet-size senior pictures and 
told people what they meant to 
me, even wrote full letters to some 
as they left to move into their 
new dorms. I’m embarrassed to 
admit it, but I actually tabulated 
a list of my friends, complete with 
schedules of how often to keep 
in contact with them based on 
what ‘friendship tier’ they fit in. 
My very closest friends belonged 
in the ‘talk to every 
week’ category, while 
my good friends were 
‘text every two to 
four weeks,’ and my 
vague tertiary friends 
were ‘text every now 
and then.’ I thought 
I could keep a strict 
schedule in order to maintain my 
various high school friendships.

Of course, that didn’t happen. 

I think I failed the first week I 
moved away. As I would learn 
over the course of college, and as 
I’m still learning now, endings 
can never be perfect. Closure isn’t 
always possible, and sometimes 
things must come to an end 
without a tidy resolution. The end 
of college is, of course, also the 
beginning of something new and 
exciting, but it’s wrong to pretend 
it isn’t the end of something 
important and irreplaceable.

My senior year of college has 

been imperfect in a way that 
high school never was. The 
pressure of post-grad plans has 
hung over everyday life like an 
ominous cloud, preventing me 
from fully feeling the weight of 
everything, from processing the 
fact that it’s all actually ending. 
Besides, college endings are 
weird and anticlimactic — back 
in middle school, on the last 
day of school, we’d all sign each 
other’s yearbooks, and at least 
in high school we all had the 
same last day of school, the same 
prom, the same graduation date. 
In college, people all move out 
at different times depending on 
their final exam schedules and 
their summer plans. There’s 
no climactic day when you can 
deliver your perfect goodbye to 
everyone you care about.

Last night, I watched the 

series finale of “Girls.” “Girls” 
has never precisely been about 
college, but the journey Hannah 
Horvath (Lena Dunham, “Tiny 
Furniture”) goes on seems to 
parallel my own, in some ways. 
It’s a coming-of-age story about a 
young woman whose perspective 
of the world and herself shifts 
over the years. I started watching 
“Girls” the summer before its 
third season aired, which also 
meant the summer before college 
began for me. It feels fitting that 
the show is coming to an end just 
as my college experience comes to 
an end.

The series finale of “Girls” 

was 
an 
anticlimactic 
affair, 

filled with low-key moments 
of connection and growth. If 
“Girls” had a bombastic ending 
with massive leaps of character 
development, it’d be disingenuous 
to the spirit of the show, which 
has always been concerned with 
emotional realism. The closest 
“Girls” got to a traditional sitcom 
ending, complete with satisfying 
emotional catharsis, was actually 

the penultimate episode. And 
even that was hardly conventional 
— sure, all four of the main 
characters appeared onscreen for 
the first time in more than a year, 
but the scene ended with them 
decisively ending their friendship. 
These women have outgrown 
each other, and the show is bold 
enough to suggest that they were 
never there for each other in the 
first place.

Many times this past year, I’ve 

craved big moments of finality, 
sappy 
reminiscing 
sessions 

with friends and huge personal 
revelations, 
like 
the 
crowd-

pleasing series finales of shows 
like “Friends,” “The Office” and 
“Parks and Recreation.”

I’ve managed to have a couple. 

One night at a party I bonded 
with my friend Sam, talking 
honestly about heartbreak when 
the only things we’d really talked 
about before that were TV and 
movies. A week ago, I spent a full 
day with my close friend Shev, 
hammocking in the breezy spring 
weather and just talking for 
hours. My fantasy this year was 
to have a day like that with each 
of my friends, a day after which 
I could safely feel like we’d given 
our friendships the attention they 
deserved.

But I’m sensing the end of 

college, in reality, will be more like 

the finale of “Girls.” 
In “Girls,” Hannah 
didn’t reach perfect 
moments of closure 
with most of the 
characters. She made 
peace, to a degree, 
with her ex-boyfriend 
Adam and her ex-best 

friend Jessa, but it’s unlikely 
they’ll ever be close again. She 
almost completely forgot about 
her old friend Shoshanna, and 
her friendship with Elijah will 
remain long-distance as long as 
he’s pursuing showbiz fame in 
New York City. She hasn’t talked 
to her ex-coworker Ray since she 
awkwardly tried to give him road 
head and he crashed the truck. 
Even her best friend Marnie 
is still self-centered, helping 
Hannah raise her baby just to give 
her own life meaning.

Some people will criticize 

this ending as incomplete and 
unsatisfying. But “Girls” is a 
purposely untidy show, based 
on incremental growth and a 
realistic lack of easy closure. It 
reflects my life better than those 
closure-heavy 
sitcoms. 
The 

ending of “Girls” is imperfect, 
just like my own senior year. I 
haven’t connected with all the 
people I’ve wanted to this year. 
I’ve failed to stay in touch with 
some of my favorite friends. On 
the positive side, I’ve continued 
to form connections with new 
people, even in the last month of 
my senior year — but that’s untidy 
in its own way, because I’m sad 
I won’t be able to build on those 
new friendships when I leave Ann 
Arbor. These are some of the same 
imperfections that riddle the last 
season of “Girls.”

And here I am now, comparing 

my senior year to a final season 
even though I said I wouldn’t do 
that. Old habits.

Here’s what I know: If my 

college experience was a TV 
show, the series finale wouldn’t 
show the moment I throw my 
cap into the air or hug my best 
friends goodbye. It wouldn’t 
show a flashforward to the 
moment I step out of a plane 
and see Manhattan in the flesh 
(and hell, I don’t know when that 
flashforward would even be set 
— maybe a month from now, or 
maybe a year, or maybe never).

It would show something 

more subtle, like the shot that 
closes “Girls,” with Hannah’s 
subtle expression of confidence 
and accomplishment. My series 
finale would end on something 
quiet and intimate, like closing 
my laptop at the arts desk, 
or biting into a slice of South 
U pizza, or laughing at some 
stupid meme. Or maybe I’d 
just be sitting alone in bed, 
watching the end of one of my 
favorite TV shows, smiling a bit 
as the credits started to roll.

College, TV & 
the imperfect 
closing scene

DAILY TV COLUMN

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