what does the end of high school mean, for you? by Boheng C. '28

to whom it may concern:

two years ago, you pushed open a metal gate in a fence that led to a parking lot. you stumble a bit stepping down the curb, and so you decide to bend down and squat and tie your shoes there on the soft asphalt. those shoelaces would come loose many times in the next few hours. but you don’t know that yet, for you had just pushed open a metal gate in a fence.

once you’re done tying your shoes, you walk out the parking lot. you find a circular blue bench, shaded, and sit down. you’ve never had lunch there, even though most of your friends have, but you suppose it’s too late to change that now. all of your friends are there. it starts to get blurry. perhaps it’s your eyes, fatigued from sun (now orange veering on mahogany, horizon-bound, still glamorous and undiluted of its vernal glimmer). perhaps it’s the delirium of one too many sleepless nights. or perhaps it’s the miasmic cloud of two years of forgetting, of forgetting that flattens and disfigures and chokes, that chokes all memories except, perhaps, the memory that your shoelaces had untied themselves several times that day.

you take a photo of the bench. it is a nice bench, after all, even if you’ve never had lunch there. you take a photo with your friends. your social studies teacher is also there. he pulls out a card you filled out a few weeks before, which is supposed to say how you want your name to be pronounced. and you did fill out that card with the pronunciation, using the international phonetic alphabet: /puɔ³⁵ xɤŋ³⁵/. your high school social studies teacher stares at you with incredulity and asks what the hell those symbols mean. you laugh. he would never learn how to pronounce your name, because for some reason, you think that it’s futile to try and teach him.

you stand up and start walking. beneath your feet is concrete pavement, then unpaved sandy running track, then dew-soaked crunchy grass that inundates your untied shoelaces with mud. you sit down on a muddy folding chair, then look at the stage and listen to speech after speech after speech, listless, until the words flow over your mind and lull you halfway asleep under darkening cerulean sky. then you’re startled awake again in disbelieving attention: you stand up, your social studies teacher is on the stage, he’s making an announcement, you get in a winding line and you walk across the platform, cautious of your untied shoelaces, robe undulating in the wind and lei rocking back and forth and tassels draped across your neck in ridiculous concentric necklaces, and then your social studies teacher reads your name, incorrectly of course, since you never taught him how to say it, but of course it doesn’t matter at all, it’s all over now, you run back and hug all your friends and pose for jostling crowds of cameras and say the longest, most painstaking farewells you’ve ever said, goodbye goodbye and goodbye, goodbyes that tarnish your robe with grass and warm teardrops, for you have just graduated from high school, and when you come back tomorrow morning and push open that same metal gate, one last time, to return your textbooks and the last of your graduation paraphernalia, your high school no longer recognizes you. by being there, you are occupying a space that you are not supposed to occupy; you are alien, someone that ought to be excluded by the fence encircling the school: you are no longer a high school student.

and then your shoelaces come undone, once more.

in the two years since that day on which you pushed open that metal gate, a lot of things have happened to you. you went to a party the day after graduation with your classmates, where you watched movies and burned your homework in a raging bonfire and reminisced about four years while half-submerged in a pool. that would be the last time you saw most of your classmates. you went to your friend’s house one last time, then you went to a beach outing with the science olympiad club, scalding sand and wind and the memory of a conversation on the metro about the meaning of college and the future and other such big things. but amidst the infinite blue sky and the heat-distorted screech of the train wheels, that didn’t seem real. nothing was real then.

later that month, you would begin to cry. you would cry in your bedroom, muffled by pillows; you would cry while showering and eating lunch and while you tried to succumb to the grace of sleep as the horizon brightened near dawn. you cried because you missed everyone and everything. five thousand six hundred hours is a long time to spend with your friends, but even five thousand six hundred hours eventually ends, often sooner than we would like. and when those hours did end, you were alone once again. 

much later, as you went off to new faraway places to meet new faraway friends and do new faraway things, as all of your old friends went off to new faraway places to meet new faraway friends and do new faraway things, you look back. you used to talk to these people every other hour of the school day, then every week through your headphones and a voice channel, then later every two months, each time prefaced with an increasingly long-winded here’s what i did since the last time we spoke. what have you done? where are you? who are you? 

then somehow, inexplicably, you find yourself forgetting. you ask yourself if you ever cried when you left them, if you ever ate lunch under a stairwell with them or ran through packed passing period hallways with them or helped cover up the sound of school fire alarms with them. and perhaps that’s the most terrifying part of it all — to know that you once cared, to know that it was all once important to you, that it was once everything for you — but to realize that it no longer is. 

yet for you, none of that has happened yet. after all, for you, it’s still two years ago, and you had just pushed open a metal gate in a fence on the way to your high school graduation. so congrats on everything you’ve done! 

and enjoy this day while you still can.