Nostalgia is a funny thing. It is like the remnants of the rosy-tinted glasses with which we used to see everything in our childhood. It hits you when you least expect it and in ways you could have never predicted. Like how you could have waited 12 years to graduate school but the moment you do, there is nothing in the world you want more than to do it all over again.

School, for some, had been an obligation. For others, it had been about education and education only. But for some of us, school was much more than that. It was a home, a refuge, a different world. Here we were not bound by our parents’ expectations. It was a blank canvas, and there were no hard and fast rules for the painting. We were, simply, like ourselves.

We could not realise then that we had been making some of the best memories of our lives. Those circumstances would never occur again with the same people and places. Maybe, it was the childlike innocence that hung in the air. We laughed at the smallest of things and played the stupidest of games. That was before the complexities of life took over. Before, we knew how to differentiate between good and bad. I was talking to my best friend about school and it hit me that someday I would meet people who wouldn’t know my school lore.  They would not know the inside jokes and my references. I will apologise and explain the origins to them. I will tell them about the time when a former best friend broke a bench, or the time when we skipped classes. They will laugh and we will move on. But they will never truly know how each person, each memory, each experience was fundamental in making me the person I am today.

For those of us that share this sentiment, time right now is bittersweet. There is the freedom of the end but a tug at the heartstrings, willing me to step back into the familiar.  For the past 12 years, I wondered what it would have been like to walk out the school gate just one last time. I thought it would be liberating; like my world was anew with no more homework to get through.

That was the goal I worked towards during my CAIEs. To leave. Every gruelling moment at my study table, every mental breakdown, every sleepless night was compensated with the thought that in an x amount of time I would be done. But as the moment came and went, I felt empty. It was a random Tuesday for some but I had just lost my entire world as I knew it. Surely, I know I am welcome back anytime but I also know that it would never be the same. It would be someone else’s story and we would only be visitors. The mark we left behind reduced to a mere scratch in the fabric of time.

So, my next question should be— how do you compress 12 years of memories into words? With much to say no way to express it, I must ask— how do you begin to explain it? And when you start— where does it end? What do you include and what do you exclude, especially when everything was important? With a foot out the door into adulthood, but my mind still in the classrooms, I am left with a feeling that I do not quite comprehend. So for now, I am calling it nostalgia.