Lost after graduation

This is embarrassing. It’s never very seemly for a man to write about emotional things publicly. From the Internet, things are so easily concealed. Perhaps this is a subject better suited to introduce after a long-lasting and profound rapport has been established and time is of the plenty, but I would not wish what I’m feeling right now on the worst of enemies.

My friend asked me if I cried at graduation. I gave no reply.

Ha! I knew it, she said. That’s okay, everyone got a little teary then.

Except, I really didn’t. We were still together, about to be together for another summer, still accessible and in close range.

It does take a while for me to respond to this kind of change. Nine full days after my actual graduation, I really did come undone. All the while, I refused to acknowledge that somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt I needed a good cry to release some of the fear of the future and attachment to the past.

This delay is nothing new. By the time I started loving the International Baccalaureate program, others had long grown accustomed to it.

I like to think that I’m not so fickle. I won’t like you one day and not the next. When sentiments come and go, they approach and fade. The one-day emotional emancipation that so many of my peers seem to exhibit, I hate it.

It’s simply difficult to understand how something so tragic as death, as miraculous as wonder can affect you for one moment, but not the next. I don’t understand how you can trust someone to be true, when they don’t, or can’t, hold emotion for more than a day.

This kind of trait is oft mislabeled moody.

Right now, I’d rather stay in the past. No clever quote or rationalization will change that. I’m sorry, that’s just the way people are sometimes.