It is Tuesday, May 16, and two weeks from today I'll be going to the airport and flying back home, and Year Course will be a thing of the past. But it's hard for me to sit here and try to sum up the year for this last article, because I hardly feel like the year is even ending. The days here in Sde Boker go on, one by one, as normal. There's no packing, no frantic picture taking, no last trips to this place or that place–no change. I'm sure this is not the case for everyone on Year Course, and by the time this article makes it from my laptop to the Internet, for me either. But right this second, I am still very much in the midst of life as I know it. And I don't know how I feel about that changing so dramatically in so few days.

Sometimes, I am ready for Year Course to end and to go home to my family, friends, and working at camp. It's not that I want to leave, I just have an understanding of the fact that part of the reason this year is so special is because it has a deadline. I have a plane ticket with a date on it, and I have until that date rolls around to have the type of year I want in Israel. This isn't like home life that goes on indefinitely, this is timed and not going to go on forever. So sometimes I'm ready to take my experiences and my memories and move forward, knowing that all I have gained from this year will always be with me and I will be stronger and better because of it.

But that is all too hypothetical for me right now, because right now, at 8:05 pm, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, typing away at my laptop, a year and a lifetime away from when I was typing away last August, 19 days before Year Course and Hurricane Katrina. Amanda, my roommate, is sitting at the other end of the table, dealing with the iPod shuffle situation and cutting vegetables for a salad. We just got a phone call about our volunteering tomorrow, and we're going to be joining another group of volunteers at Bir Ha-daj–a Bedouin village 40 minutes away–teaching women Hebrew in their homes. The two Year Course boys we live with are next door in their room, listening to their own music and cooking dinner, I assume. We spent the day in Nitzana, a small settlement by the Egyptian border where we celebrated Lag b'Omer with a campfire and swam in a giant reservoir in the middle of the desert. And then we took the bus from Nitzana to Be'er Sheva, where we rode through the yellow desert, stopping only at army bases to pick up soldiers. In Be'er Sheva, Amanda and I walked to the Bedouin shuk and bought vegetables and pita, and then caught the bus back to Sde Boker, where we now sit, drinking tea and eating our pita and salad. I keep reading her each new paragraph I write and she tells me if I'm being too cheesy (which I can't help) and life is good. So right now, I don't exactly want to take my memories and go, I like them as my reality. Now, I enjoy all of the things that are about to change for just being normal. I am still amazed that I am on a program and some committee just placed me here and yet things are more perfect than I could have ever imagined !

But at the end of the day (which it is), this was a year in my life, and it's been a long year and a good year. I wouldn't change anything about the way I went about it, which come to think about it, was probably my main goal of the year–to not have any regrets looking back. And I don't. It's been as perfect a year as it could have been and it will be a special and meaningful time in my life forever. What's better is that I know this wonder won't be cut off May 30 at midnight; it'll be with me the rest of my life, experience to experience, friends to friends, from these adventures and understandings and thoughts to the rest that are all still to come.

So I leave Israel and my time on Year Course with anticipation to go back to what I know with new eyes, excitement for the possibilities of the future, appreciation for my experiences this year, the greatest love and respect for Israel and those who shaped my year, a deep sadness to leave the country, an intense desire to return, and absolute support for anyone who wants to and will spend an extended amount of time here in Israel. It's really the only way to go.

Mia is this year's Year Course correspondent for Young Judaea and JVibe.