Chapter Fourty-Two: Last (~jinghan)
It’s that time of year for last things: like last minute studying, last exams, last minute paper work and “at last it’s all over but what do I do with my life now?”
I’m sitting on the bench in the vicinity of the Royal Exhibition Building flicking through my physics notes. I stop and skim a proof of finding the magnetic field of a line of current and hope that I will remember it if I’m asked to recreate it in the exam, but really I’m hoping that it won’t be on the exam at all. I’m hoping to do well in this exam, because otherwise my mad-woman three days of intense study would have been for nothing, but really I’m just hoping this’ll all be over soon so I can finally breathe easy.
When impatience and nerves deem reading my notes pointless, I get up and head towards the Exhibition Building. To be honest, I like this fifteen minutes before the doors are opened. You keep catching sight of people you know among the hundreds milling around outside the doors and you realise how many people you’ve come to know over the semester. There is a feeling of connection in our common edginess.
The examination hall is enormous. It is even bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It should make anyone feel small, but instead you feel too big in your isolated single desk, the exam paper looming even larger in front of you. It seems almost inconceivable that such a large room of people can be so silent. Perhaps a certain Alice would feel a sense of deja vu if she were to sit an exam here. The silence is broken by the sound of retching from the bathrooms. One thousand people ignore the sound and pick up their pens.
All exams have a last moment. It’s around the three hour mark but you do not know when exactly it is, so you either scribble away madly at a question that you just can’t seem to work out, or doodle in the margins ready to accept whatever fate brings in the way of marks. And then out of no where the last moment passes and the big booming voice says “PUT YOUR PENS DOWN NOW.” There is always one last person scribbling some extra line, like the last horse to cross the line. And we are all looking around to catch the eye contact of people we know to share either horror or happiness.
With people I have never eaten lunch with during the semester, I walk to Thresherman’s Bakehouse* and order a sandwich bursting at the seams with relief and a milkshake frothing at the lip with joy. And for the first time in what seems like ages we talk without glancing at our watches, and it is brilliant. In the next few days I donate blood, run revision maths for yr12 students, get my hair cut, see an old friend and meet up with a new boyfriend. It feels just like I have just finished my last exam.
Except that I haven’t.
A week later I find myself at my desk again going through notes, doing practice questions, memorising trivia, stressing about getting everything done before the exam day. But my heart’s just not into it anymore. My mind and body is complaining, “Why are you putting me through this again? I’ve worked hard for you. I deserve a nice long break.” To make things worse, my friends that have finished their exams keep organising parties and get-togethers, some of which I can attend, but none of which I want to be reminded of while I’m stuck by myself studying.
Its not until 4:15pm on Thursday the 25th November that I walk out of my last exam for real. I head back to Thresherman’s with a friend and have celebratory baklava. Usually baklava, flaky on the outside but oozing with honey, is a bite of heaven, but today the baklava is too sweet. And the celebratory nature of it all dampened by one more deadline.
It’s 2am on Friday the 26th November; though for me it’s still the same day as yesterday. My exchange application is due on the tomorrow that is actually today. I am still writing my resume and exchange essay. The printer is refusing to work. They promise us that exchange is going to be a brilliant experience, and I believe them; it’s just a bit hard to feel excited at 2:30am after your last exam when you should be finally free from stresses. It’s a bit hard to feel excited when you’re applying for something that is six months away and doesn’t feel quite real yet. It’s a bit hard to feel excited when you’ve been through hundreds of hard-to-navigate and too-much-text university websites trying to work out which university you want to go to. Its a bit hard to feel excited when you’ve had to dispatch email after email to get approval for subjects you only vaguely know you want to take. Its a bit hard to write a passionate essay when it’s a bit hard to feel excited.
It’s 3am on Friday the 26th November, and I am excited. The printer finally put out, and everything is sitting all in the pile in glossy hard-copy. It feels important that I finally have something tangible to prove… to prove what? To prove that there is a pot of gold at the end of the impossible rainbow? Something like that. I am at last excited. Too excited to sleep.
It’s 9am on Friday the 26th November, and I press the “All Enquiries” button inside the student centre. A paper ticket with “26/11/10 8:57am NUMBER 001. Please wait for your number to be called at the service desk.” prints out. I stare at it for a second. The last time I had one of these tickets the number had been 457 and the number showing at the desk had been 340, and it had been an hour later after I had left for an appointment and come back that my number had been called at the desk. It seems almost ironic that I should be the first in at the student centre when I’ve been pining for all my last few things to end. I take the ticket.
“Are you number one?” the lady asks me after she boots up the computer.
“Yes. I have my exchange application.”
“I’ll give it to that guy over there.”
The guy flicks through the forms “Is it signed… ah yes. Okay thanks!”
“Uh… is that all?”
“Yup. You’re hear from us in the next few weeks.”
I walk away a little dazed and very purposelessly. At last, at last it’s all over. But what do I do with myself now?