I packed up my college life in a few hours — a task that the single word "pack" compresses to seem manageable; the actual process of compression in reality being absolutely not manageable — and set off to Banff. I skip over some of the emotions around this time, ones similar in vein to [[goodbye to farewell]] — but it's also cheating to refer you to earlier emotions I once had, and so please fill in the blanks however you expect the end of my first year to have felt, as is your right in my failure. I finished exams around a week earlier than all of my friends. As Lawrence's parents fed me Shin noodles while insisting it was okay to not eat all of them — and I insisted I really did want to — I laughed internally at the irony of my first bite of instant ramen being at the end of my college year, and I also thought about things on an earlier timeline. I grabbed boba with the Asian Moreheads the next morning before setting off to trusty old RDU. I flew home for one night, immediately stopped all productivity, and demolished my mother's cooking. On the Rocky Mountains: apart from various dinners, cool hikes, and nice views, the only notability was that I expected to finish two of my final assignments in ~3 hours, whereas they actually took about nine. This meant around day 3 of our trip, the meeting point of my procrastination and the midpoint of our travels, I skipped dinner to eat cold pasta salad on a hotel bed while typing furiously on my laptop. And thus concluded the Canadian sojourn. I then flew *back* to RDU, in order to attend "training" in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Again, I skip over some of the classic, nice-sounding reflection of growing up in a big city and then spending time in X smaller city in the Southern United States. Instead, I leave you with this pair of anecdotes. One: we were staying in single dormitories, and so this interesting effect of infantilisation happened where we would gather in common rooms and find the most optimal usage of the same limited resources (the gym, the vending machines) — some likened it to summer camp, others to high school field trips. Similar in function to the outdoors, albeit to a lesser extent, the atypical social structure helped strip away some of the typical noise. And this is how I understood Rocky Mount's magic. Second: part of why packing was so difficult was that a substantial amount of my items had to go up to Toronto with me in order to be shipped to Cleveland. And so, I ended up in Rocky Mount's premier — sometimes spoken of like Rocky Mount's singular — cafe, Larema's, with roughly six boxes of assorted household goods and an understanding smile from the barista once I explained my bizarre situation. And this is how I felt Rocky Mount's magic.