Some Goodbye

Every morning when I wake up it doesn’t feel like I am going to school anymore. There is something very odd about it. It’s a weekday, but somehow it’s just another excursion, it’s a shopping trip, it is an ordinary day. The clothes are there, the process is the same, but I could never be more aware; both consciously and unconsciously, that I am doing this for one of the last times ever. It is always an anti-climatic surprise when my feet hit the pavement at the school.
I forgot I guess, the morning that was the last bus trip in.

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Sitting in my last class ever. My last high school class ever; is one of the most surreal and bitter experiences of my life. It was supposed to be different to this. Well, it all of it was.
I forever associated the last year of high school (or VCE, Victorian Certificate of Education, over here) with this one sequence I remember from a TV series called Always Greener. Cam, (Abe Forsythe) was in his last year of school; and I think at age 10, when I first saw this; it formed a lot of my perception of VCE. He was part of all those things that are intrinsically linked with VCE: being 18, driving, drinking, parties; and all that. He studied alone in his room, he crammed before exams, he thought about cheating, and his mother brought him that cliché poster of the kitten hanging off the washing line that says ‘Just hang in there’, and he resented it.
And he looked about 21. I think the actor was that age or younger, but quite a lot of the boys in my year do look their age or older.
The boys start to grow beards and everyone gets that remarkable stilted yet round teenage glow. There is something so distinctive and yet undefined about that age and that look. The brand new cherub-like and yet sophisticated emergence of the cheekbones; the new hair colour, the plastic sheen of the girls, and the perfectly maintained fashionable image that is the epitome of adolescence in magazines; the vitality and untouchable nature of something so new and yet so established.
For some reason I will never, and have never, had this. I look at myself in photos and I see a stranger. I see the clothes, and the hair and anything else I spent some time and effort creating. But it really says a lot about how often you look in the mirror, but do not see.
I feel a sophisticated woman, of more years than my own. A slim, taller woman, with a waist, whose breasts suit her body and does not feel the need for heels. One with better hair, hair that she may have not wanted, but hair that she has time for – without the strange shapes of a cut grown out long ago. A girl I saw in mirror in my dreams once when I was younger, who would be the age I am now. A woman who looks good enough in photos to justify her want to be in them, and who holds no regrets as to the result; and who doesn’t half blink in all the shots. A woman with a smirk, not strangely flexed lips; and a smile, a real joyous smile that shows her teeth to be interesting, not irregular. A seductive red pout and perfect ivory skin, not tarnished by the freckles that go with the red hair she wants but did not get. A woman with a slimmer face, beyond all else. A woman who looks commanding and wise, with cheekbones accentuated by a perfect gothic hollowness in the cheeks and high set eyebrows. A woman called Anika.

That’s what VCE was supposed to be like.
I’m supposed to feel more grown up and enjoy leaving school. The joy of not having to go to class anymore is meant to allay your sadness about not seeing your friends again. You’re not meant to miss your teachers or the comfortable routine and knowledge, as well as miss your friends, but not so much – so I’m just sad about all of it.

So many things were meant to be different. I was meant to make a collection of all our family recipes to take with me to Melbourne.
I should have pictures of all my teachers. I planned it ages in advance. All the wonderful girls in the English office. I was in love with their world. I thought I loved one of them. But she left, and I never saw her again. Most of them left, and I knew; and I never had the guts to ask them for a photo and say goodbye in all the words I felt.
I got given a second chance a few weeks ago. One of my current teachers was meeting up with one of my old teachers on an excursion. When he, this teacher, when he left he gave out his email address, and I really wanted to keep in contact with him. In some ways, like I have with my IT teacher this year, I was looking after him. He was older than me of course, but he was younger in other ways. A lot of the kids connected with him on their shared level, but I don’t know, I think sometimes we transcended that. I never felt little around him.
But after I got over my procrastinating to contact him, I found I had lost his email address.
So I imposed upon them when I heard he was in town, to get a second chance, to get his email again. And I gave myself a good mental kick up the arse to actually tell him out loud that he looked well, and how I felt bad about not keeping in contact. I never noticed until that day how very much he looks like Johnny Depp, and it kind of annoyed me; I bet no-one has ever told him that. We all ate pizza and talked about school and university. And it wasn’t awkward until we started walking back, my teacher and him, walking in a pair, cemented as teachers and adults; the girls behind me, also a pair, who tagged along because they had nothing better to do and didn’t hardly speak a word the whole time, the kids; and me – with nowhere to stand, clumsily trying to keep pace with the adults and failing on many counts.
I never did get his email. Even after I got up the courage to remind the teacher who was with us. And then it was just too awkward and obsessive.

The whole business of leaving is so ugly and poignant.

The music is getting louder, the people are getting softer. To the point I am sure I must finally be embracing the teenage disquiet and doing permanent damage to my hearing.
I noticed the other day how my teacher’s hair is growing longer. It made me sad to think it, for some reason.
I look out of the bus window and see the hills and the trees and the paddocks; noticing it all for the first time; all that unexplored distance. All I wanted to do one day was stop the car and get out and just run. Just keep running and trying to touch those hills and that void. And I never did.

They practically forgot me out of the photos and the presentation at graduation. But that’s not what mattered to me. It was the last real moments that I forgot all about. I feel if I had a tomorrow I could be ready for it.


Right now, I just wish I could feel anything.






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