| | I had the wind knocked out.
I did not expect it to hurt this much.
Last Friday (and a bit of Saturday morning) marked the end of a four-year tenure I shared with about nine hundred other similarly-aged people.
We are people now. Most of us are still students, but we are not children anymore. This is what a diploma does.
I am probably never going to see most of you ever again. ("Never" meaning until the ten-year reunion.)
Four years won't be very much forty years from now, but it's almost twenty-five percent of my now-life.
Twenty-five percent. That's ..that's four apples and taking away one. That's how many months summer gets in a year (how many months I get for summer this year). That's not enough petrol in your tank for a trip from Arcadia to Davis. Twenty-five percent is half of half.
I am probably never going to see you again.
Of course, I'll see you, in passing, when the universities let out early and we all converge upon the high school for raising ruckus and reminiscing. I'll see you on Visitor's Day at band camp, I'll see you when we drop in on the first Wednesday night rehearsal and AFOB.
But no more playing Pavlov to the daily bell schedules together, jostling through hallway crowds together, exchanging words together.
One of the -or maybe the greatest- things I'll miss about Arcadia is that sensation of being hemmed in by four hundred other people and knowing that they all want the same thing that you do (or something similar). It was a uniform and being indistinguishable, but knowing that your personal excellence is vital to the cohesion of the group - as a whole. It was a four-hundred-person Bb-major chord and knowing that you could never produce something of that depth or sheer enormity on your own.
I'll miss that.
I may never see -a lot of- you again.
And these aren't the pedestrian faces I glance at in the halls. These are people with whom I was vaguely familiar - acquaintances that made me smile and made the days lighter, more bearable.
I'll miss that, too.
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| | Posted 6/17/2009 11:57 PM - 25 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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you couldn't have said it any better, janice.
go aggies!