As the academic year comes to a close, students prepare to say goodbye to their college friends for the summer, and some get ready to graduate, moving on to the next stage of their lives.

Here are some songs about coming to the end of a period in your life. Giving them a listen might help sort through all the complicated feelings that surround goodbyes.

“Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA

ABBA is at their most emotional with this song, discussing the feeling of watching your child grow up and move away. While this isn’t the exact type of ending that a lot of college students are experiencing right now, most can relate to the feeling of watching someone we love leave, be that a friend who is graduating or an older sibling moving away. ABBA beautifully describes the feeling as a “surge of that well-known sadness.” This song commiserates with the listener’s melancholy and the desire to “try to capture every minute.”

“Graduation (Friends Forever)” by Vitamin C

As the title suggests, this song is about graduating. Vitamin C reminisces about nights spent up late talking with her friends, of simpler times before their lives took them separate ways. and the hope that they will stay as close as they have been through the years. Alternating through semi-rap verses and sung choruses, which epitomize the rapidly changing feelings of graduating. Every chorus ends on the hopeful note that “we will still be friends forever.”

“Night Changes” by One Direction

No song has ever encapsulated the feeling of suddenly realizing how much time has passed like this popular track by One Direction. Over a simple pop production, One Direction asks the listener if “it ever drives you crazy, just how fast the night changes?” as they contemplate the ever-evolving and fleeting nature of youth. Despite the unstoppable march of time, the song has a hopeful note that no matter how fast life moves, “it will never change me and you.” The people we surround ourselves with are what cement us in time.

“Rivers and Roads” by The Head And The Heart

This song deals with the real sadness of moving on and saying goodbye. With just a guitar, The Head And The Heart sing about friends moving away and not being able to see them anymore. No song so perfectly expresses the deep sadness of saying goodbye to your friends as this one. While they acknowledge that people need to move on in life, and “they’re goin’ to better places,” the sadness of this song is pervasive and sobering.

“Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield

To end on a more positive note, this incredibly popular track by Natasha Bedingfield considers every end a new beginning. Bedingfield uses the metaphor of a book to explain that the rest of life is so open and free — anything can happen. Listening to this song at the end of a semester or college as a whole, one can’t help but feel excited for the possibilities to come because, as she so beautifully puts it, “the rest is still unwritten.”