**GRADUATION**
9:20 a.m. | 2001-05-27
Peering into the mirror, two things happen to me simultaneously. First, I hear a tune running through my head that is familiar and yet strange in a way, and, secondly, I am trying to see if I really look any different. The tune running through my head is the familiar and yet strange Pomp and Circumstance that I have heard for years and years when I have attended the graduations of so many of my good friends and relatives. But, for some reason, it sounds different today. And then there is the �me� looking back from the mirror. I always thought that I would look different on the day that I graduated from high school. Everyone else had looks so poised and so grown up on their special day, but I am just the same as I was yesterday and even last year. Nothing has changed; my mind and my looks are exactly the same and in
some small way I feel cheated. Over and over for the past few years I have heard, �Wait until you graduate....things will be different.� Well, where, I wonder, is the difference? In just a few hours I will be graduating from High School. It is my commencement. Even that seems like a strange word when all I can think
about right now is all of the things that I will be leaving behind. How can this be a beginning when it is actually an ending. I can remember all the days I complained about having to get up and go to school, complained about the
cheerleading practices, complained about the rules and regulations which kept
me from doing what I wanted. Tomorrow, I will not be a student anymore
and I will be expected to make my own decisions and my own rules in life.
Let me tell you, that is more than just a little frightening. I wonder if all of my classmates are feeling the same things I am right now? I always thought
that some special sort of wisdom would come to me when I was about to
graduate from high school and I would know exactly where I was going and
what I was supposed to do to get there.
This day of departure is probably one of the biggest journeys that I will
ever take in life. And somehow, I feel that someone forgot to send me the
road map. What�s more...I am not even sure where it is that I want to be
when I get there. One would never set out on any other journey without a
destination and a map of how to get there. But on this journey, I am on my
own. I think that I have the tools to get there safely. And at least I know
what kind of a person I want to be. But, it that all there is? Thirteen years of school all building up to this? A couple of hours of ceremony, hugs, tears, and parties and then I will be on my own. I always thought it would be more fun than this and a lot less scary!
So this is the departure. I would give almost anything to be able to predict my arrival. Where will I go, what will I do, who will I meet along the way. In five years, will my friends still be the same? Will I even know them or they know me? Or will we be as strange to one another as the face that is
looking back at me from the mirror?