I often hide in the routine of my days.

There is a strange comfort in the stasis. When one knows the next day will be just as the last one was, there is usually little hesitation in approaching it. I can pay scant attention to the time that slowly passes, reassured that tomorrow will be a do-over, a fresh start at the same old. The grass will be just as lush, the sky bright blue, the main auditorium intact. I can avoid seeing things as they are, because I can still see things as they could be if changed for the better. 

These days rarely last forever, though. Eventually, I start running into small hints that remind me to keep moving on — that the “same old” will stay right where it is, but that I have outgrown it. Always near the big transitions, and never easy to stomach. But if I would hope to navigate this next one peacefully, I ought to face it.

I found it abnormally easy to say my farewells. I knew why, and that it wasn’t right. I could always visualise a “next time” to do it. There was always a “next time” — perhaps I’d see everyone during the next fest, or my PS-II period, or when the institute let out for the summer, or convocation — enough to warrant putting off the emotions until later. Even when those final days would come, I could exchange social media handles and promise to stay in touch. The painful process of coming to terms with the end — why would I want to put myself through the ordeal, and so many times at that, if I could sidestep it? And eventually, years down the line, when most of these ties inevitably end up severed, I would wonder where it ended, how, and why. Instead of going out with a bang — so to speak — so many friendships would die a quiet, abandoned death. I feel it was dishonourable — in my fear of saying a proper, final goodbye, I did something worse — I did not say it at all. 

There are some handholds that I grasp as I flow along — some material, others not, all equally important. The myriad lights that adorned my room, the videos documenting all the antics I got up to backstage, and the few fest snaps I took back home with me mean as much to me as the dozens of quiz slides in my Google Docs, the photos I keep of our wing, and the texts I save of conversations with friends. I am driven to these things in times of nostalgia. These are pockets of the past, tears for the pensieve, as I see it — where my psenti-sem is still an alien concept, where I still have a quiz to dread the next day, and where it is still my privilege to light the auditorium up. These things hold a surprising amount of emotional weight for how little I worried about, or cared for them while I lived through it all. And sometimes, I think, before I return to solemnity, perhaps the others in these memories ought to know it too.

I then went home and waited for the emotions to hit. Surely the cold, hard reality of finally having completed an undergraduate life would have to hit sometime now, and it would have to hit hard. Surely that would be the catalyst to my affairs being sorted, to my final conversations being had. I wondered when it would be, that I would find it hard to breathe when lost in nostalgic memory. I went home, and it felt like any other break between the semesters did. I went on vacation, and that too felt like a respite from the academic struggle. I met friends and family, packed up to move to a different city for six months, wondering all the while when the fabled “psenti” would hit properly. 

It anticlimatically fell upon me a week into my eighth semester, during an idyllic PS-II start. The circumstances are not as important as the feeling was, and the feeling hardly mattered compared to the realisation that followed. Now I feel the emotions, and what of it? I wondered. Who’s there to tell? A solitary life in a new city, the people who mattered are not here. The people I have wanted to communicate this feeling to as it washed over me at my own write-up — I am simply not with them. I am elsewhere, on my own way, and I left them amicably in December, because it hurt the least to do things like that. 

One would be given to think I ended my affairs with some regret at the handling of its finish. Somehow I do not think so. The ideal farewell I long for in these texts is probably, well, ideal. And I think what I experienced — the write-ups, the farewell dinners, the traditions, the last few walks around campus, and all the conversations — was about as good as it could’ve gotten. I left campus with a sense of completion, and of contentedness, and I feel privileged to have been able to feel thus. So much for regrets — I have far more thanks to give. And for better or worse, as fate would have it, I do have a next time. Several next times, in fact. And perhaps I will make the most of them when they come.

Well, then. I think I’m finally out of words.