graduation
kinda blinkin’, this will all be in the past
By the time I sit down to write this, it is past eleven on 20th September 2024. It has been 2089 days since I stepped into SOTA on the first day of Year One as a bright-eyed and more-than-a-little-lost twelve year old. I’m eighteen now, and I graduated a few hours ago, and it doesn’t feel real yet.
(the fire isn’t real / yet /
but maybe it will be soon)
Earlier this year, Julian submitted a poem to PubliCASion that shares a title with this post. Eight months later, in August, I submitted my response to it. twelfth august is also my response to many other words, people and places that I have encountered in the past two years, and it is a love letter to them too.
Substack doesn’t handle formatting well, and the formatting for this is important, so please bear with the ugly screenshot instead. I don’t plan to ever fully explain this poem, the choices I’ve made with the lines I’ve quoted, the way that it has been formatted, the people that it has referenced, because if you know you know, right?
I’ve never been fond of writing poetry, I never felt that I was any good at it, but there’s something about these past two weeks that makes me itch to write. It’ll take a while for the words to settle and coalesce into something that means anything, but I have a lot of writing planned for the next year or so. I hope you stick around to see it, to see what I create after six years of rubric and the lack of it now.
So much has happened in the past two weeks that, in truth, I don’t really remember the specifics of anything. I know that I was happy though, that I had fun, and that is enough for now. It will come to me, when it is time to write.
For now, I stare at the foam boards wrapped in plastic tucked behind my laundry bins, wondering how I ever found the courage to put my work out there for anyone to see. Trying to find it again.
Bits and pieces float through my mind, accompanied by snatches of Tell Me and Fighting which I have been listening to on loop together with the other songs in preparation for the final performance today. I think the best word to describe what’s on my mind would be ideas. Flashes of color, occasional turns of phrase, an after-taste in my mouth, that’s what drifts through my mind. I think about t-shirt signing and the little moments I’ve shared with so many people in the course of these six years (six and a half, for some of you whom I’ve known since TA), leaving splashes of color and memory like fingerprints (or is it: and fingerprints?) on a piece of a memorabilia that will gather dust in the back of a closet somewhere, the same way our memories of these times one day will.
But, there’s nothing wrong with that, I think. It is enough sometimes, to know that something exists. It matters, that it exists. We matter, and we exist.1
Last night, because it is 21st September 2024 now, I sat with Clarice on the SOTA steps. We talked about a lot of things, but one of them was memory. I won’t say I am notorious for my bad memory, because as much as I make off-handed comments about being unable to memorize anything, I largely avoid revealing the extent of my poor brain.2
But, my memory is bad. As much as forgetting is part and parcel of everyone’s lives, especially mine, it terrifies me.
For that reason, I am always trying to photograph the world and people around me in motion, so that I can remember those moments as they were, imperfect as they were. For that reason, I am always trying to jot down the words that cross my mind, trying to capture the feeling of being who I am where I am. For that reason, I fear I may develop a hoarding problem one day, because I hold onto every card, every post-it I have ever received — even if I may not remember where to find them, I know that they exist somewhere in my room, and that is enough.
Maegan talks about the idea of remembrance better than me, but it’s not my place to publicize writing behind a locked account so all I can do is encourage those who follow her to read and read and read the caption of this post again. (There’s a hyperlink there, please click around until you find it.) (Update: she posted it here.)
For many people, the idea of not being able to remember something is saddening, but only so much because you don’t regularly try to remember what you have forgotten. For me, I feel that it may be better to say that I do not know, rather than do not remember, because that’s what it feels like.
That is why I am so afraid; at one point, I knew you like the back of my hand and secrets spilled out in the tiny space between us, but my hand seems to be a different one now, and I no longer know what I told you and what you told me; what if I no longer know you at all?3
But, I do remember:
I remember how we ran to the end of the block between classes when the sky greyed over and the feeling of ice-cold droplets of rain against my forearms; I remember being able to toss the ball up into the air when swarmed by my friends and knowing that you would catch it no matter what; I remember returning to afternoon math lessons barely in the nick of time and sitting on the edge of my seat while sweat soaked through my kueh lapis shirt; I remember the ticklish feeling on the back of my hand as you would turn me into a canvas with white gel pen in the second-last row of R7;
(I’m scared to continue, because I’ll have to confront what I no longer know;)
(But we have to go on, even if all we want to do is spin in circles;)
I remember clambering up the half-rotted log at the Level Eight open area, rambling about the endosymbiotic theory like a madman, spreading my arms wide open under the sun, trying to absorb the light and warmth so that I could keep the spark in my chest glowing, so that I could keep it growing;;;
I remember and I do remember, and I remember so much more, but also so much less. For the past few years, I’ve told myself that it is enough that those moments existed and that I felt what I did then, which was mostly naive joy, and that I carry what I have experienced and what I have learnt with me. For those of you who are afraid to forget, perhaps that is something that you would appreciate to hear.
Perhaps I am already romanticizing the past, but the hallways of SOTA and the Class of 2024 saw me through my teenage years relatively unscathed. In truth, I know that I was not always happy and, given that I was pretty emo even as a pre-teen, I was probably happy only less than half the time. But, thinking about my time in SOTA as a six-year block of time, the rose-tinted lenses have already descended over my eyes, and I find myself thinking about the phrase: naive joy.
Things were simpler, says the person who had to write an incident report in Year, says the person who was still a student 24 hours ago and has yet to sit for IB and will come back to meet teachers next week anyway. But, it’s true. In my head, I’m already generalizing that blob of time, and when I do, I picture myself childish and sheltered and happy. Maybe later down the road, be it by the end of the year, or when I start university, or when I graduate for it, I might think that N on 21st September 2024 is still a child (technically a teenager) and too sheltered to understand what I am saying. Maybe both the former and the latter are true, because the moment I’m living in is always when I will be the wisest, the most nostalgic.
I often complain about my school, sometimes about the people. But, I also want to thank both for giving me this generally safe space to grow up, because the person that I am and the person I will become are shaped by those that I have spent majority of my waking hours around for the past six years. They have seen me through my firsts and now that I am running out of lasts to share with my peers, all I want to say is thank you.
One day, these will all be wisps of memory. One day, we’ll just be stories.
But now, but right now, we are still not over. There’s the final IB challenge left, as Luis said, and a whole life out there ahead of us. In truth, I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head around the idea that I have graduated, if at all. When I think of James saying to take it all in, that it is the last time we’re all breathing the same MPH air, I feel like I just heard those words at another tech run. It hasn’t hit me that he’s not going to say that again, because that moment has come and passed and all I was worried about at the time was doing the lights well.
Honestly, I’m just running from the fact of the matter. And in doing so, I suppose I’m barrelling on ahead towards the IB days, to the last of our shared lasts together.
There will come a day where my thoughts are more in order, and I can offer you something more than a jumbled monologue, but we are not there yet. It is not the time for that yet.
It is, however, the time for me to end this post. To everyone else, thank you for seeing this post to the end, for perhaps seeing me to the end of this chapter too. To the class of 2024, to my friends, let’s finish well together. Whatever is to come after that will come. We will get to where we are meant to be.4
At this point, N fell asleep with the above section still incomplete. But at least it exists in part, and it is enough for now.
However, I want to be completely upfront here and say that if I ever wrote you a card, I doubt I still know its contents. Those words are yours now, my gift to you that is yours and yours alone. I want to apologize for any promises made on those pieces of paper, but I also believe that because I meant everything written there, I will fulfill what I told you I would, even if I do not know the semantics of it.
Somehow, I have doubts that this is the way semi-colons are meant to be used. But, misusing semi-colons will always have a special place in my heart for the people I associate with it.
Which, at time of writing, was dinner for me. Go eat!