Senior Symposium # 11- Closing Time

Every party that starts must end. The brilliant sun, which endows this earth with its nourishing radiance in the day must leave at night time, to be replaced by the mild moon. The same goes with Woodstock. I stepped through the school gate five years back, now I must take the same step, in the opposite direction, into Life and beyond.

The cheering and congratulations that explode with an incredible momentum seem vague and distant. Beside me, the people, their faces and complexions, look no more interesting than a mass collection of colors and skins hastily squashed together to manage this ill-prepared show. Somehow, I feel sick of the thick air that begins to permeate Parker Hall. Nothing matters anymore. The world is no more than a stale and ghastly ghost floating purposelessly around me. Some guy steps up and reads an inaudible phrase. It must have been the closing ceremony, because people get up, start to cry and hug each other. I remain motionless for a very long time, longer than I have ever been before.

That night, we the seniors gather at Tavern for a final party, before each of us departs for the four corners of the world the next day. There are no teachers, no parents, only Renegades. People dance and smoke, sob and cry, and dance and drink and get drunk to boil away the tears. The nauseating smell of sweet alcohol and salty teardrops and bitter cigarettes pervade the little restaurant. A tasteless feeling creeps up and I feel like throwing up, to faint and disappear.

I rush out to the door. The peaceful air outside is refreshing and sooths the mind. No longer do I feel worries and discontentment. Leaving is difficult only because I have hardly done it before. I feel frustrated, I admit, by the fact that whatever relationships I have built, whatever I have of Woodstock, friends and teachers, memories and experiences, will be crushed by this parting, by a gust of the wind. How much crueler can life be? Yet at same time, another voice within me speaks of reasons and logic. Suffering is not difficult if there were no happiness. Life is not felt and appreciated justly if there were no deaths. Similar, new acquaintances that I make I will infinitely treasure, only by the disappearances of old ones. It is not easy to accept such cold facts, but now I really do, and I crush the sadness of the farewell under the weight of my new life, a life so hysterically and crazily unknown.