High school was a year ago, so how’s college life?

Gabi Rizal

It is fun. A new city. New faces. The kind of independence I once hoped for. And yet, every day, I find myself longing to be a high school student again, as if my heart never graduated even after receiving that diploma. 

I miss our classroom, which was everyday filled with loud laughter. The boys at the back strumming guitars like time was theirs to waste, the girls on the other side braiding hair and secrets, our classroom mayor at the front getting stressed because of the noise, and my best friend beside me, the one I wish I could still sit with.

How I wish I could be in that room again. The electric fans loud but a bit useless. Chairs bearing carved names, half-finished doodles, and random scribbles. The board holding on to yesterday’s lessons with equations erased already from our minds but traces are still left. The wooden exit door where my friends waited for me every morning, as if the day could not begin without us complete.

I miss them the way my friends and I walked home together after school, bonding over fishballs or the sourest Indian mangoes, letting the sky change colors above us as we recalled the day and talked about all the random, things we can think of. We talked about everything and nothing, teased each other about our crushes, unaware that these ordinary walks would be all we had left to remember.

I also miss our Intramural. The heat, the chaos, the booths, and the crowd. The way we screamed our lungs out during basketball games, even when the team was already losing. The way your eyes would quietly search through the crowd for one person while a band played a Cup of Joe song, and your heart is beating louder than the drums or guitar being strummed.

I miss my school. It felt ordinary then, but its hallways witnessed my becoming. Its classrooms held my laughter and my tears. Its buildings watched me survive each day with my friends. The quick lie to the teacher about going to the restroom just to reach the canteen. The sprint through the lobby because I was late again. The corners that held me when I needed to breathe.

They told me to cherish high school while I was still there. I did.  Still, I miss it, more fiercely than one misses an old love, because this was not just a person I lost, but a version of myself I can never return to and some of my friends whom I had no fights and no goodbyes, but I guess we already stopped turning the page together.

High school is different. And now, it hits different.