Closure

It's late, I'm just back from concert, my blog is a mess and I'm a mess. But there's something I've got to note down, and I plan never to forget it.

It's just a small detail, but it's often these things that leave the most lasting impressions.

Okay... flashback to last year, after the Saturday night concert... was it Saturday or Friday? After the show, we were spread around the stage, taking group pictures and trying to hold on to the time of our lives. I was walking past the front row of seats when this woman approached me with a little girl in tow.

She told me how much she had enjoyed our performance, and how her daughter - the little girl now clinging on to one of her legs - had been thrilled to catch the comb I threw into the audience during the dance. And sure enough, there it was in her daughter's hand - the little black comb we all decided to buy on impulse. At the time she couldn't have been more than three or four years old.

She doesn't exactly look like that, but let's pretend she does.

One year passed and I forgot all about the girl and her mother.

Maybe I was setting my expectations too high after what we did with Grease last year, but this year's concert definitely felt in want of something compared to its predecessor. Maybe it was how fast everyone disappeared after the show was over, or even before... there was no celebratory mood as there had been the last time.

Walking past the front row of seats, I was approached by a woman again. She smiled at me as though she knew me. She asked me if I was the same boy who had been in Grease, and this didn't surprise me... I'd been recognized as such by parents before. I said yes, I was, and behind her I noticed a little girl clinging to one of her legs.

Realization struck me like a load of bricks.

She spoke to me, confirming what I had suspected... she was the same mother who had complimented me last year, whose daughter had caught my comb and was now standing, noticeably taller, in the same position she had been the last time we met. She recognized me, and according to her, so did her daughter. The girl shied away from me, exactly as she had done previously and I was just overwhelmed by the most perfect feeling of closure.

It was more than I could have hoped for, more than I had ever dreamed of.

Closure, that's what it was. Closure of the last memory I would ever have performing before the whole school, and of the one almost-perfect year that had followed after August 2006, when I discovered what would become my deepest passion.

That's over now. I'm not being - to employ a word already abused by our students - emo or anything, but it's a fact. Tonight was a lot of last chances for me, and the far from perfect result meant that I missed most of them.

Nothing left to look forward to, huh? Nothing left but to hit the ground running, towards the trials and the SPM... And it'll be over so soon you'll look back at your school life and wonder where the time had gone... or maybe it's over already.

That's just too depressing for words.