Senior Memories

It’s that time of year again: the seniors in high school are about to graduate. After coming home from college, I have lost all sense of time, and had I not come across the school newspaper today, the graduation could have easily passed me by. Such a historic occasion only a year ago now feels a bit stilted as I flip through the pages of the paper, reading article after article of advice for underclassesmen. I smirked, I reminisced, I even laughed out loud. To replay the memories of the Senior Awards night, the Renaissance assembly, and the ‘farewell’ editorials with different people is a strange feeling–a mix of confusion, deja vu and nostalgia.

The center page, in particular, was especially awkward. There, displayed proudly in two full pages, is the crown jewel of vanity: college admissions. Despite a year at Berkeley learning about the illusory social construct that is the institution, I find that I cannot remove my eyes from the list as I scan the rows of students with guilty pleasure. Again, I admit to feel quite shallow to feel the urge to label my fellow peers with their new University acceptances, but it is an impulse I accept as being part of the human condition. I will fight it, but I am only human.

Ultimately, the trip down memory lane was a somber and quiet one as I reappraised my own graduation experience last year. As special and unique as it is for each graduating class, the high school graduation repeats itself every year as new hoards of students stagger out of high school and into the blinding light of their next destination, whether that may be college, work, the military, or whatever they choose. Seeing my own graduation juxtaposed so closely to one that is upcoming, I find myself anxiously groping for my old impression of graduation, the one that was painted by naivety, the romantic memory of a not-so-distant past. Unfortunately, on the day of graduation, I was forced to take a red pill so that if I return, that image of the past will never be the same. The high school as I knew it will be forever gone. The teachers may still be the same, the benches and tables may still have old graffiti, and the hallways could still be as full and excited as it always is when the bell rings, but… no. It is not, and never will be, the same. And that is how the cookie crumbles.