Dear High School
Dear high school:
You know, despite how often I bemoaned your existence to anyone who would listen, I actually didn’t hate you. I loathed waking up at eight o-clock each morning instead of twelve as I’d have liked, I detested frantically turning in my rushed assignments on Sunday evenings before deadlines passed, and I dreaded each and every gathering held in the name of school spirit, but I didn’t hate you.
I also didn’t like you, for all the reasons above, and quite a bit more. I thought that having three periods out of four in a school day being a study hall was ridiculous, for one, and I couldn’t stand the triannual state tests we were made to take. Though I didn’t hate you, I thought that the moment I graduated, I would let out a breath held in for four long years and sprint on forward to the next segment of my life with nary a look backwards. In retrospect (with the wisdom I’ve gained in the two months since I’ve bid you farewell for good), I have no idea how I was so confident, given how often I am wrong.
The jarring realisation that I missed you came on a chokingly hot day in July, as I lay on the floor of my bedroom and listened to songs I’d downloaded years ago from an ancient playlist on YouTube. It was simply my luck that one of those songs was written by a freshly-graduated high school student like myself, about being a freshly-graduated high school student, except ten times more melancholy than I could ever be about breaking free from the shackles of grade school. Its tune was familiar, but the lyrics were not - when I’d found the song, I’d been on the cusp of preteenagehood, after all, and they meant absolutely nothing to me. Neither did I pay much attention to them, not until the chorus, which goes something like this:
“我只想拉住流年
I only want to grab onto the fleeting years,
好好的说声再见
properly bid them farewell
遗憾感谢都回不去从前
No matter what regrets and gratitudes, we can’t return to the past
我只想铭记这瞬间
I just want to clearly remember this moment
我们一起走过的光年
The brilliant years we spent together
六月后,光年成纪念
After June, these brilliant years will fade into memories”
Before I go on, in case there’s anyone familiar with Chinese reading this, I am sorry for the inaccuracies. This was a translation by a Canadian-born teenager of Chinese descent whose fluency was borne entirely of Chinese dramas and webnovels, with a painfully small vocabulary and an overactive imagination. I beg your pardon and the pardon of my ancestors.
Though my translation abilities are limited, I understand the lyrics well enough, I think, or else my revelation would have been somewhat mistakenly timed and placed. Realising that I wasn’t able to leap forward into university as lightheartedly as I’d imagined was a significant shock, because not only had I not formed any significant attachment to my peers in years I’d shared classrooms with them, I’ve also believed myself indifferent towards you. I almost never contacted any of my classmates outside of class, and if I did it was nearly always about homework; I hadn’t formed any deep bonds with any of my teachers; and I was one of the four students who skipped the homecoming rally in favour of study hall. I thought I had no reason to miss high school, and nothing to miss, but it turns out that I have plenty.
Now that I’m safely graduated, I can proudly reminisce: going sixty miles per hour trying to make it back to class on time with friends, holing up in the nooks inside the student centre with a stash of free snacks, coffee, and overflowing gossip during aforementioned study hall periods, and our games of hangman with atrociously misspelled words. I didn’t think any of them were special at the time, and perhaps if they didn’t represent an era of my life, they wouldn’t be. It just so happens, though, that these are the highlights of the three years I spent with these classmates, highlights of brilliant years that are already memories.
We didn’t need a flashy seniour trip, or a heartfelt good-bye banquet, nor did we have one. High school, for me, ended on a stuffy Thursday afternoon after a casual school barbeque behind our classrooms. I waved to my teachers and to the classmates I passed in the parking lot, then got on my father’s car, and picked at the split ends in my hair as we drove away. Maybe it was because there was no ceremony and no dramatic farewell, that it took me nearly two months to process that it was truly over, and to miss them. My teachers’ “don’t be a stranger” didn’t mean anything until my brain started functioning and deciphered what had happened, that the people I’d seen five days a week without fail for three years, might be people I’d never see again.
So high school, I still don’t think I like you very much. You were annoying and tedious and could be so insufferably bureaucratic, but somehow, between the standardised tests and the seemingly endless hours of study halls, I miss you. June has passed, and you’re a memory now- maybe not a fond memory, but a warm memory nonetheless, and now I can only hope that you fade slower, and then slower still.
Song: 纪念 by 雷雨心
