An Ode to Apeejay

For some reason, I feel extremely reminiscent today. What with my recent decision to always think in the narrative made on a trip to Vaishno Devi, I guess this post had to come sooner or later (given the number of buses I travel in every day), although the topic that I write about today came as a surprise even to myself.

It’s been about two years since I collected my passing certificate from My School, and in those two years, I have visited that most hallowed of places only once. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to visit it, but there always was something that kept me from going back. If I have to put a name to it, I would say it’s an insecurity that I’ve had ever since I passed out. School always, and especially in my last two years, was a place where I went to have fun, meet my friends, roam about aimlessly in the middle of Chemistry or English class with one classmate or several. It was a time when I was both an extreme recluse and part of the most active friend circles at the same time, valuing both these traits as not just habits, but as leashes of existence that I held onto, afraid of losing what I thought I actually was (something I don’t think I have a clue to as of now either). It was a time of uninhibited joy when I was around my buddies, playing footsie beneath the benches, making fun of our Physics teacher, arguing with the Math one, and generally laughing around with the English and Computer Science ones. Even in the evenings I didn’t let go of my quarter-home, and conversations over the phone continued for hours, things like parents discovering a relationship, cutting school to go watch a movie, helping someone get over a break-up (they HAD to be bad, there was just no other way), settling arguments between friends about a bad word he might have said to her when angry, and everything about people else that I find innocent and hold dear in life.

So now, every time I sense that familiar feeling of a hook being attached to my heart and pulling me towards those familiar corridors, there is a heavier dead weight attached somewhere near my right ventricle that tells me it is all over, that those classrooms are inhabited by new people, many of whom I haven’t even seen or heard of before; that cleaning over the summer term has wiped away my pen marks on the glass window of class XI A forever; that the several notebooks that I filled with my writings, sitting alone on the last bench, and which now lie in my room were all for nothing as the person I wrote them to is too far away; that there shall never be another group walking out of class XII to sit in the library in collective protest of Mr. Kataria’s assignments because even he has moved on; that the scribble shirts that we wore on our last day were in fact the last memorabilia that we shall ever have to remind us of the 14 years that our parents kept telling us matter the most in life. That even though we may meet again, it is never going to be the same camaraderie we once shared on those sacred staircases, feeling like the Golden Gods of our establishment in our blue-and-grey.

So I can’t even begin to imagine what my seniors at college are feeling right now, everybody has their levels of attachment to what they hold dear, but while they say goodbye to their home for three-and-a-half years, I’m still finding it difficult to move over the school I left 2 years ago.

(For someone else I stumbled across who’s leaving her school right about now, check out Ria’s blog at: http://ria-air.blogspot.com/)