Before dying in a fatal car crash, Yale graduate Marina Keegan, 22 wrote a hopeful piece for the Yale Daily News: “The Opposite of Loneliness.”

An accident in Cape Cod claimed the life of Keegan when her boyfriend Michael Gocksch lost control of his car and hit the right side guarding rail. Keegan was declared dead on the scene while Goksch is in stable condition.

A few days before, Keegan graduated magna cum laude from Yale University. She was going to start a job as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, before her life was abruptly taken.

“She was just one of those amazing, wise souls that was given to us as a gift,” ” Keegan’s mother said in a statement. “She had an unbelievable, beyond-her-years way of looking at the world, and her passion was to try and use her words to explore the human condition.”

In her last piece for the Yale Daily News, she wrote a heartfelt editorial called “The Opposite of Loneliness.” Below are a few excerpts from her essay:

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.