on crazy days
“move to the music of a missing dream, now
slide to the sound of a savage scream, now
the words don’t matter
as long as they scatter
like rain
like rain”
College. One moment you’re waking up at 7:15 so you’ll be just in time for your 7:30 class, dreading the reports, seatworks, exams, homeworks, plays, productions, lab works, programs and what have you that might come pouring down like manna from heaven as you enter the hallowed halls of the campus. The next day you find you’re just a bum. No buzzer beater showers, Good Morning Surprise Quizzes, Hello World 80 pt. Seat works, or 3-hour grueling Debit-Credit b.s. You’re just another graduate; you will be lining up for work the next day or for food rations the week after next. There will be no more wondering if Leibnitz ate lemma for lunch, or if those Greek letters on the formula are actually encoded love letters of Leithold. Life will be boring. You will be working 8 to 5 jobs with 1-hour lunch breaks, while missing those classes you so lovingly scheduled two hours apart so you could still sneak in at the local movie house in between each subject.
Where did all those years go? You start to wonder. How did I let all those years pass by without even so much as a thought? Yes, that time in a bottle song doesn’t sound so melodramatic anymore. What happened to the crazy days -- Marching to malls sporting crazy attires and collecting bewildered looks and catcalls from onlookers? Where have all the band fests, mindworks, yearly lantern parades, cookouts and weeklong campus days gone?
You carry a new cell phone to work, a PDA, a laptop, all the latest gadgets. You strut along the business park counting the days till your next trip abroad, but still you dream of waking up on cold mornings during hell week, the org meetings that stretch up to early evenings, the rallies amid the scorching heat, the long and almost endless lines during enrollment, the grouchy looks of some instructors when they’ve had a bad day, the naked man with his arms outstretched looking up to the sky, that crumbling “new building” with no ventilation, and that circled number on those colorful class cards that almost always gives your parents a heart attack.
“once you forget, it’s over,
just start again
once you forget, it’s over,
take what you can
before it’s gone”
Time moves fast, so fast that even the speed of thought can't capture all the memories you want to keep. You pause for a while. You close your eyes and start thinking of your college years. Those funny turbulent years of experimentations, with undone home works and getting away with it, with not studying for exams and acing them, from collecting ticket booklets of movies to visiting all new food and clothes shops, to attending jam packed, head banging concerts. You remember doing stupid things for what you thought were the right reasons, that one moment of insanity that brought you to the edge of recklessness, the momentary happiness in knowing the rules and breaking them, the misconstrued views you were willing to die for, and those angst filled poems, which used to be fashionable.
You stand in the center of time, ten million lifetimes over and done with and only hinted upon by photographs and souvenirs and words. Every scrap of paper whispered of so much more than you can even begin to remember. Life was there, on that other corner of your mind. And college was more than just a preparation for life. It was life. A big part of life. And its over.
“she runs from the sun of an alien sky
she jumps from the mountain to learn how to fly”
Tonight, my thoughts are collecting; my eyes are wandering over the landscape of the past and thinking of the farewells both real and imagined. Everything in between was something so wonderful that it hurts to write it down. And this was college for me.
