John Cage “composed” his famous 4’33” after a session in the anechoic chamber at Harvard, the most perfectly soundproofed room in the world. But in the utter silence of that room, he was surprised to find he could still hear two sounds. When he described them to the head engineer, the man laughed. He told Cage that the high wine was his nervous system, the low hum his blood.

It’s a dramatic comparison, but when I ride my bike at night through the streets of Evanston, I understand where Cage was coming from. There are just two sounds: tires swishing across the asphalt and chain links creaking against gears. Different, definitely, from the bodily ambience Cage described, but these sounds sink into my subconscious when I go riding – create a quiet more quiet than any that can exist naturally. I am used to them, these two sounds. We’re familiar. They create a blank screen onto which I project my thoughts.

I’m of the opinion that you can get used to anything. Some people are faster or slower at it but, generally, that’s what life is: you enter a new stage, like high school or college, and you adapt to it until, ideally, you start to thrive.

I’m in the slow camp. It took me a good three years to really get into the swing of things at Northwestern. Now that I feel like I have things under control, it’s almost time to leave. I’ve finally started keeping a detailed calendar, I stay on top of my tasks and my relationships have, for the most part, reached healthy, stable plateaus. And while that won’t all magically disappear when I rearrange the tassel on my graduation cap, a whole new series of challenges will manifest in front of me.

The bike riding has become part of my adaptation process. It’s a coping mechanism. I go for a ride, and I think about things. It’s my anechoic chamber – a moving room without distraction where I can sort out my life in silence. I especially like to ride at night. There’s something clean about the streets after dark, as if dusk could dust out all the trash and distractions when it sweeps through. The slight physical strain is refreshing, and I breathe air like, I imagine, a fish breathes water: completely.

I was on one of these rides when I got the call. Coming down Sherman, past the construction on Lincoln, my phone started ringing. I had my headphones in so I put the call on and kept riding. A few blocks later, by Fireman Park, I rolled to a stop. My dad had called to tell that my grandmother Stella passed away. It was earlier that day. I sat on a bench in the park and cried. But the story of my grandmother’s life is long and beautiful and for another time. Here, I only want to refer to it in constellation: a month later, Eddy, the dog I’d had since childhood passed as well. It may seem to silly to put his death on the same personal scale as the death of my grandmother, a human being, but if you’ve ever been close to an animal, I imagine you know what I’m talking about.

The death of a grandparent and/or a pet is classic coming of age material for a growing young person. Something formative that many of us have gone, or will go through. What bothered me though, what really drove me crazy, was that they seemed ahead of schedule. Didn’t the universe know that I was still wrapping things up here? That I couldn’t yet be home to really get the most out of these deaths?

It made me feel weak – to love someone so much as to be brought low by their absence. Of course, neither of these deaths was unexpected. They were both old. Each had lived a long and happy time. Their loss of life was not what disturbed me: it was the fact I did not get to say goodbye. That there was no way I possibly could have. That I stayed out late. That I didn’t call more. That they were gone was not the hard part. The hard part was that I would miss them, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I’d done something different in the past, if I’d somehow just known, then I could, in the present, have some kind of closure.

This is how I learned about the selfishness essential to loss. At least, to my personal loss. This is how I learned that the stages of life aren’t always so clean cut – that the need for adaptation is constant, not separated into cycles and phases. And this how I learned to be mad at myself – to really loathe the fact that I was so upset at two of the most natural losses a person can experience. After all, there were people all around me feeling much more unexpected things, losing people you aren’t supposed to lose. Who was I to feel what I felt, to grieve the anticipated? Because the truth is, I knew what we all know: that our time always, with anyone, is limited.

Coming to terms with that, too, was a learning experience. Because when I looked back, when I entered, again and again, the anechoic chamber of my thoughts, I realized this: What would I even have said to them? How do you say goodbye to anyone?

Last spring, when all the seniors I knew were leaving, I did my best to say my see them all off. But you can’t see to everyone. Can’t wish them all well as they depart. Can’t have all clean endings. Some, I saw for the last time as a face in a crowd. Some I whizzed by on my bike, waving, obliviously, goodbye. And some, to be honest, I already hadn’t seen in months. Were they already gone? From me, at least?

This, I think, is the broader truth about college: that you do maybe a fifth of your learning in the classroom. That the rest is about people, how to treat them, with dignity and respect for their experiences, and how to say goodbye when it’s time for you to part. It is about breaking hearts, and having your heart broken, and learning to lie to your parents. It is about learning how to help those who hurt, and also how to show your injuries. At least, that’s how it was for me.

So this is for the friends I lost touch with. The people who I don’t remember the last time we talked. This is for the stalkers and the crushes and pedestrians I passed on a regular basis while biking to class. This is for everyone I know, and everyone you’ve ever met: let go, but don’t forget. Because all you have, all you can ever really have is what you chose to take with you, what you project in your anechoic chamber – whatever that chamber may be to you.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s to keep everything I learn, every fact I’ve had to face, every bitter truth to which I’ve grown accustomed and every friendship that has survived my own emotional stuntedness. I love you. And now I let you go. At the end of the day, when I’m riding in the dark, I will think of you. Will you keep me too, in the high whine of your mind, and the low, low hum your love?