Time flies. Funny how, though the people change, it's always the same events, over and over. Another year, another graduation. But that's life--the old depart, so that the new may rise. Circle closes, or the circle opens into a spiral; the torch changes hands.
Coincidentally or not, we received our yearbooks from 2010 on the very same day the batch below us graduated. It was an arrangement that brought upon me, suddenly, those recollections that I had been suppressing--whether willingly or not, wittingly or not--throughout the year.
I can't say I miss RGS dearly. Most of what I loved about it were the people, and almost all of them came along with me.
But I suppose it is the movement away--like departing from a place that I can never return to--that breaks my heart most: to know that I will never be that person, in that place, in that time, again. Sharing those same horrors over what are mere trivialities now. Making jokes I don't even laugh at anymore. Being naive.
Goodbye. I don't think I ever said it, properly, because I took for granted that the physical place would still and always be there, took for granted that the people who made it special came along with me to JC, and would always remain the same people, our ties remain the same, our smiles still shared.
But with our graduation, both changed--the place has grown so different, populated by thousands of psyches that would never perfectly echo our own. As for the people--time and movement and shifting circumstance have transformed them. Have I, too, transformed?
Everything has changed.
A few days ago, I watched my juniors' grand finale. Is that who we were, a year ago? Who I was, on that stage that has been redecorated over and over? Did it rain last year?
I look back on the things I wrote on my blog, at the height of graduation euphoria last year.
It did rain last year.
I had a strange sort of foresight. I knew things would change.
But I didn't expect enough, as a result did not do enough to hold it tight, and I regret that direly.
But goodbye anyway, even though it's far too late; goodbye to whatever little still remains of what was. I was ungrateful, and flippant, and apathetic; that self disgusts me now. Maybe in a year's time, some of my juniors will have the same reflections as I now do.
