An Empty Orchestra Room

Today was the end. In all of my shitty grades and terrible coping skills, it was done.
I got out of finals an hour early, and decided to wander around before being yelled at/directed by the hall monitor to the cafeteria. I wait an hour there, scrolling through my iPod waiting for it to pass.
The period ended. I was officially free from school. Excited, I wandered into the orchestra room by instinct, and, almost surprised, found it empty.
I'm not in orchestra. I quit in 8th grade. And yet, that haunting empty room was terrifying.
Because from this moment on, it would always be empty after school.
Let me explain.
Day 1 of freshman year, I was been the young sycophant that desperately wanted people's attention and thus never got any of it. I had no friends.
My sister, a semi-well off sophomore at that point, was not in that state.
I don't know exactly how, but one day I joined her social group in the orchestra room after school, or at least the rag tag assortment that showed up there.
Most of them were my sister's acquaintances/friends, but pretty soon my best friend and I found a place there, and they became our friends.
We did alot of things in that room, mostly hang out until 4:00 talking about random crap and screwing around.
There was no Denny's we went to or a daily ritual we had. We weren't all good friends.
But we showed up there, most of the time.
That was the place where I kicked a violin locker in frustration after being palmed off by a friend. It was the place where me and my best friend hung out, talking about random crap. It was the place where we hid behind the gaping towers of chairs, playing games of if we could fit behind them or not.
A lot has changed since then.
I go there by instinct now. Three years I found sanctuary in that room.
I find myself continually disappointed at how empty it is, at how I won't find Betty packing up her stuff to get to the bus or Victoria sitting on the floor by the door, eating a snack as I say hi. I won't see Noel standing by the door talking to a friend of his right outside the door. I won't see my sister sitting in the big spinny chair at the front of the room, talking or yelling or even cursing someone. I'll see none of it. Because they graduated.
And now there's nobody in the room.
It's sad.
I can't imagine next year, the haunting feeling twisting in my heart every time I feel the need to pull into that room and find that the comfort I found there is gone, replaced with an empty room that stares back at me instead of giving me what I had come to expect. No comfort, no warmth. Only emptiness, and silence looking back at me.
Here's to senior year, to looking into an orchestra room and finding silence. Here's to the end of junior year, beginning messily and ending in silence.
Here's to it's end.