Graduation

February 23, 2007

There was one episode in Tom and Jerry Show when the very smart Jerry was finally killed by the awkward Tom. I was seven then, and I cried when the little mouse’s ghost rose out of its dead body. The title of that particular episode was “The Graduation”.

Since then, the word graduation has acquired an acutely insane meaning to me: very synonymous to dying, to passing away or finally “graduating” from the earthly existence. If I haven’t found Mr. Webster, I might as well believe that yes, graduation really is the end of life.

Now that I am about to graduate from college (crossed-fingers), I think graduation is really is the end of something, maybe not as gruesome as life, nevertheless poignant in so many ways.

When you a leave a particular event or phase of your life, something dies, maybe not at once but eventually, and it would be a shame not notice that it passed you by. When I graduated from high school, I think that “something” which died along the transition was the innocence and all the advantages that went along with it.

College then is a tragic coming-of-age experience for me, something as relevant as seeing your first porn, or hissing your first cigarette in public. Although college is not the time when I learned the many firsts in life, it offered me the explanation and the connect-the-dots of the many firsts, some ghastly but mostly funny. For once, the UP experience alone is big enough to bring to you the time of your life. It is said that being just in UP, even if you don’t attend to your classes, is already a learning experience in itself. I have proven this many times, and one even got me a grade of 5.0 (but was later retracted, thanks Jesus).

I am sure each of us would have our share of stories to tell ten or so years from now of what UP is all like as I speak today. Some of these stories may not make us proud (like how UP at long last succumbed to tuition fee hike, which fee is the most exorbitant in the history of the university), or some may just make us smile pensively (like how you were dumped by the person you were so crazy about during college). Soon enough, these things that are happening next to you will just become ambers of memory, some distant and some you will hold dearly for the rest of your life. Memory is the death of today. And graduation will eventually begin the dying.

Lately, my brain has been obsessively trying to remember all the color that paints UP— blue skies and maroon-colored buildings, the orange mote of sunshine squeezing through the trees, the yellow-line circumventing the Academic Oval, the green Sunken during rainy days and its brown version during summer. All these will become sepia someday, detached and yellow-old.

I also try to remember as much as I could all the faces that I would pass by along the many streets in the campus, the smell of burnt grasses in the afternoon and the nice smell of spring in the morning, the sounds of honking UP Ikot all over, the noise of Melchor Hall. Old age sometime later may not give as the pleasure of what these regular days can offer.

So before you eventually graduate from UP, take yourself for a walk one nice morning and let all your senses do the favor of remembering so that this way, you will never miss which “something” will first say goodbye, or that maybe, so all these may not die at all.