Lessons Learned

I am sitting in my mother's gradually accelerating car, luxuriating in the innate inertia of the passenger's seat. I am curling back against the sun-warmed upholstery, dipping my toes in the constant ebbs of exhaustion that threaten to sweep me into emotional oblivion. I am trying not to think.

My mind and memory throb dully with the day's unrelenting assault of ceremonial symbolism. Graduates, straighten your caps. Graduates, pick up your corsages. Graduates, walk down the aisle. Graduates... turn your tassels... Tiny, glaring rectangles of light still speckle my vision, an unpleasant residue of innumerable camera flashes trying to plant ephemeral emotion onto solid memento. My sweaty palm tightens around the empty scroll I am handed, threatening to crush the feeble facsimile of academic notoriety.

And through it all I smile, because my tears have already been expended.

In the car, I am slowly slipping into the serendipity of a daydream when my mother slows the car at a stoplight. She points, her smile effervescence with joy, to a small square building across the intersection.

"Didn't you used to go to school there?" she rhetorics proudly, frankly, kindly.

It is a few moments before I recognize her pun, and understanding is bittersweet. But the past tense is my sudden, unwelcome remedy and no volume of copious exhaustion can keep such simple truth at bay.