The Last Day of School - Why My Pencil Case Must Burn

Today is Tuesday the 20th of June 2017. With the completion of my final Leaving Certificate exam paper, it marks the end of my secondary education and the beginning of what I can only assume to be expectations of adult life and behaviour.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, in truth. I think it’s mainly for myself. I want to get everything down on paper, to purge the good and the bad from my system so I can move forward with a clean slate. From primary school (that’s elementary school for Americans) to today I’ve spent fourteen years in the Irish education system. Fourteen years that culminated in the past two weeks of exams which will be added up and converted into a three digit number that tells me where, or if, I can go to university. I expected to feel more than I do. I had hoped for something to hit me, something to snap, for me to wake up one morning and suddenly be presented with a certificate that says “Congratulations, you’re an adult!” but in reality I just feel exhausted. I suppose that’s what old people mean when they tell you they never saw the years creeping up on them, I know I didn’t see this coming.

I don’t mean to speak like I’m older than I am. I’m nineteen. To most reading this I’m still practically a tadpole. Surely I can save the worrying for when I have grandchildren that can serve as a captive audience. Yet I can’t help it. I’m supposed to know what I want to do with my life and how I want to do it but I just, don’t. Don't get me wrong, I’m aware that this is a big day for me and I’m sure these concerns will fade out into relief and exhilaration once the celebrations begin but they are here now nonetheless. If I’m totally honest with myself I don’t think my exams went as well as they could have, by no means abysmal but I doubt I’ll make the grades for the course I want to do. What then? Do I settle for something lesser and work my way up from there? Or do I pass over university entirely and try to make my own way in the world? I don’t think I’ll really know how I’ll handle this situation until it happens, until then I suppose I just have to let go and let the cards fall where they may.

I think that’s what writing this is really about for me. Letting go. The past fourteen years represents for me pretty much the entirety of my life that I can remember well enough to comment on. They contained my greatest highs and my deepest lows but now they’re just, gone. I need to come to terms with that fact if I’m really going to move forward. When I first started primary school I was big into Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I’ll be damned if I knew how to play it but the pictures were cool and the cartoon was fun. As a gift for starting junior infants my mother got me a Yu-Gi-Oh pencil case and for whatever reason, at the beginning likely out of necessity and towards the end more out of tradition, I have used that same pencil case for the entirety of my education. If you want to know what a pencil case looks like after fourteen years of continuous use, the answer is: “not good.”

It’s tattered and worn, it’s missing the bit of string that was originally attached to the zipper and the inside smells overwhelmingly of old pencil lead. Yet despite its dishevelled form and the jokes it would attract I held onto it. For the longest time I had no idea why I kept it but now I think I do. I held onto it because through all those years it was an anchor of sorts. It was something I had and could hold onto as a frame of reference to convince myself that I wasn’t changing, that the world around me was just as simple as it had been when I was five. That was great then but I’m done with school. I don’t need it anymore. It means a lot to me but I have to move past it and what it represents. I have to let go.

I understand that to you reading this that pencil case means nothing, but to me it’s a thing which has gained an almost transcendent quality. I thought a lot about what I was going to do with it when I finished school. A part of me wanted to keep it but I know it’s not healthy to cling onto the past. For a while I was just going to throw it away but I realised that was nowhere near a poetic enough ending. In three days we’re holding a bonfire. We’re all going to come around and burn our books to celebrate the end of school. It’s there that my gnarly, dirty pencil case will get the viking funeral it deserves.

If you’ve read this far I commend you for keeping up with my scattered thought process at this time. I needed to get my thoughts down somewhere before they drove me mad. Now that it’s done I feel much better. I’ve let go of the past, it moulded me but I don’t have to hold onto it. I’m able to move forward myself into the future and make my own way no matter what happens. Perhaps things will be alright after all.