The following speech was given by valedictorian Astoria Hall at Sundays’ regional high school graduation ceremony.

Some of my best childhood memories revolve around public restrooms. My parents would pull into a state welcome center every few hours of our annual road trip to Florida so we could use the bathroom and stretch our legs. With each stop, the temperature would increase 10 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit — we’d get into the car in below-freezing Maryland and open the door again to shorts weather in North Carolina.

In my memories, it’s always sunny and humid; there are birds chirping and palm trees line the highways. I would look out my fingerprint-smudged window at miles and miles of open field, dotted with cattle or combines or Georgia peaches. I conveniently misremember the car sickness and mud-splattered gas station bathrooms and cramped fights with a little sister. I refused to eat any Chinese food for 10 years after one eventful night spent on a hotel pull-out couch, puking up the fried rice we’d had for dinner. But that’s hardly what comes to mind when I think of our winter vacations. My mind has given all of these moments a face-lift, fixing drooping eyelids and runny noses, shortening wait times and dispersing clouds.

The knowledge that I am romanticizing these roadtrips does not ease the sense of loss I feel, however, when I remember that I will never again sit in the backseat of our old Volvo, caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic halfway through South Carolina, despite knowing how frustrating it might have been at the time. Likewise, even if high school was often wearisome, I know that I will be wistful when I remember that I will never again take the bus to Alley’s after school or have open campus first period. The nostalgia I feel looking back on Florida vacations is the same I will feel looking back on the past four years, remembering not the boredom or annoyance but time spent with friends or family or the beauty of the Florida Keys or Aquinnah cliffs.

I realize that my high school experience hardly reflects anyone else’s. Nonetheless, I believe that everyone, myself included, has one thing or another about the past four years we will likely feel nostalgic about, such as Mr. Houghton’s jokes or our hatred of Nantucket. Maybe the bathrooms often lacked soap, but my brain will prefer to dwell on how beautiful the state forest was when science teachers finally caved and let us take nature walks in the spring. Perhaps we felt that the pep rallies were absurd, but I will only think back to afternoons spent at Lambert’s Cove.

Some find the Vineyard small and sometimes isolating, but I will miss my adolescence here, with our derision of tourists, our hidden bits of beach and swamp, our old Island cars, our Dumptique and Chicken Alley, our Ag fair, our locally grown food.

Look, I have no advice or words of wisdom to impart, and it is not my intention to preach. Instead, this is my eulogy to high school. This is how I feel in the wake of this being our last few moments as Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School students.

High school does not compare to dreamlike childhood, but there are many things I will miss for the rest of my life, such as seeing the word “quartet” scrawled on cement block walls or eating lunch in Shark’s class or watermelon on Give Back Day.

We might have all complained about high school at the time, but there were so many moments of laughter that I, at least, will always remember.