Today, for no apparent reasons, the topic of schoolies (y’know, crazy, oft-drunken weeks of celebration following the end of the Higher School Certificate) came up – where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do, with whom – and it just kinda bummed me out a bit. It’s premature to be discussing it anyway, considering that we’re in our second term of Year Eleven, and that we don’t finish our HSC until late November next year. Perhaps this sentiment is peculiar to me, but while there will always be moments of boredom and angst and stress and all sorts of things, I actually like school. In particular, I really enjoy the time I spend with my friends there. I like our conversations and in-jokes and hallway banter and lunchtime hysterics, and the sense of camaraderie in a sixth-period free the day before a big assignment is due when everyone is lightening the tension with jokes and swearing their heads off. Those times when everyone is drowning in flurries of paper and notes and smuggled-in snacks, and despite the stress and panic and everything else you catch hold of the fleeting feeling that despite all of our differences, we are together. I enjoy the friends who can crack a perfectly-timed joke and distract me from stress or upset, and those priceless moments of utter hilarity when you and a friend are caught in a breathtakingly funny moment.

Maybe I’m just sentimental. Who knows? But I have never had better friends than I do now, never laughed so much, or cried so much, or cried and laughed simultaneously. I’ve spent some of the best and worst moments of my life with the people I love in the halls of this school, and the prospect of leaving, though still (just barely) distant, isn’t something I’m keen to dwell on. I think we’ll miss this, someday. I think we’ll look back on these moments before exams and laugh about how much we stressed, and talk about how we should have relaxed more and just enjoyed it, and how we should have worked harder, or less hard, and how we should have cherished the friends and experiences we had there, because it took us too long to realise their value and what we would inevitably lose. I don’t at all have a dismal view of the future, but I don’t think it’s anything but realistic to face the fact that once we leave here, life is going to change and it will never change back, and some of the friends we had will stay, but lots will move on, or drift away, or lose touch. Maybe for a little while, we’ll keep it up, but eventually, we’ll go our separate ways, without the common ground of our faded old lunch spot on the hill to anchor us, and we will never have again what we have right now.

I can’t speak for everyone – not everyone likes school, and I appreciate that. For some, hatred of the lessons is enough to tarnish everything associated with the word – for others, the social side isn’t as memorable and enjoyable as it is in my case. But for many of those who can’t wait to leave, I can’t help but feel a little sad, because the time is going to fly whether they want it to or not, and I really do believe that most of us will miss it. To talk about celebrating the end of more than a decade’s schooling when there’s still a good year and a half left just makes me sad. There is still time to enjoy before that, time to actually make memories that are worth celebrating. Eventually, planning for schoolies will become a necessary evil, but until then, I wish we could just let it be. The approaching end of a sizeable chunk of our lives shouldn’t be defined by how we celebrate it – planning the celebration should not be the point at all. The way I see it, considering the people I know and spend my time around, we’d enjoy the week following the HSC almost as much if not more if we spent the entire thing camped out in the quad at school – not that I’m suggesting anything like that! I just see it as being so much more about the people than the place we go with them, and the time left as something that it best celebrated by enjoying it, not living in the future, wrapped up in plans and concerns about where we’re going to go and who will go and whether or not we will drink. Gah, that pisses me off as well, that the drinking has become such a big issue. I think we’d have just as much fun, if not more, completely sober, because we’re interesting people, and some of us are gifted with incredible senses of humour and we all have a capacity for alcohol-free funmaking that we demonstrate most days sitting around eating packed lunches. Why do we need alcohol, just because some of us will have crossed an invisible threshhold of age that makes us legally entitled to have it? We’ve never needed it in past – we don’t sit around at lunch and bemoan that we are not tipsy or drunk at that moment. We don’t wake up in the morning and lament that we are free of hangovers.

I don’t even know where this post is going from here on. I’m just sad, because we have to leave, and because people seem to think that this inevitability is something we should be continually focused on, and because people seem to think that drinking and travelling to grand, beachy places and forfeiting ridiculous sums of money to do so are necessary parts of such an undertaking. I love the way everything is right now, but it feels like everyone else wants nothing more than to throw it away and move on.

Ah, much grumbling is the current situation here. I’m going to take my sentimental awkwardness elsewhere and leave apologies for any feelings of melancholy or disgust induced by the reading of this blog post. Have a good day, stay safe, and for heaven’s sake, enjoy the moment you are in. You only live once, after all, as some hipster on tumblr once said and then reblogged fifty thousand times in various nausea-inducing shades of Times New Roman. Oh, and I resent myself utterly for leaving this only as a parting note, but May the Fourth be with you. Don’t get it? Google is your friend