April- not as it was

There is a calmly, weird sense in the air as the season of graduation approaches. A heaviness that somehow doesn't feel heavy, maybe because of the intense Delhi heatwave, or maybe because some feelings are way too large to register as weight. It is the feeling of what was college even about, arriving quietly, without warning, somewhere between an unfinished assignment and a cold coffee going colder.

I sometimes wonder how a teacher feels watching batch after batch graduate away. Watching many small worlds drift out of their eyesight, year after year, until they have perhaps made peace with it,accepted as it is a rhythm of their life. If i ever asked them, I imagine they would have an answer so measured, so worn smooth by time, that it would sound like wisdom i could borrow. The kind of maturity that only comes from having said goodbye enough times that goodbye stops surprising you.

The third years are making plans now. Scribbling on each other's shirts. Sharing hugs that linger a second too long. Making promises in the way people make promises when they know time is suddenly, finally, real. Cursing each other out of love, the specific, fluent language of people who have lived alongside one another long enough to mean it. 

And you watch all of this, standing a year behind, and you cannot help yourself. That will be me, you think. Just like that. Just like the first year went.

You don't feel heavy about it. That's the strange part.

You feel something closer to relief or reverence, a quiet cherishing. You think, and then you contemplate, and then you think some more. Of what you were throughout this year and what you might still become. Of opportunities missed and memories made; Of nights cried into pillows, and days dissolved entirely into laughter. All of it arrives at once, unbidden, like a song ou forgot you knew.

Life here is filled with assignments and cold coffee breaks, and it moves at its own pace, unhurried, indifferent, stopping for no one, not for you, not for the third year seniors, not even for the teachers who have watched a hundred versions of this exact season come and go.

This April doesn't feel the same as the last one. 

It doesn't feel like a beginning with its hopeful opening notes. It feels like an ending score, that quiet, swelling music that plays in the background of the final scene, when nothing dramatic is happening but everything is quietly, irreversibly closing.

"The days passed by, and i find myself thinking of what I was and what i could have been, not what i am . Perhaps that is the real tragedy. Or perhaps it is just April."