By Betty Ding (25A01B), Cayla Goh (25A01B), Isaac Chan (25A01B)
Everything about this article feels a little messy. At this point, most of us Y6s would have already hung up our signed shirts from graduation, yet we’re still hung up on it, trying to find the words to wrap up two years that were anything but tidy.
Maybe that’s what makes this article so hard to write: JC life was never built for clean conclusions. Between the chaos of orientation, the blur of CCA activities, and the endless rhythm of lectures, there was always another moment, another memory, another deadline. So how do we even begin to say goodbye to something that never really paused long enough to be captured?
it’s all so strange…
Everyone says that two years go by so quickly. Well-meaning relatives trying to get you to savour your days in JC, teachers asking you to buck up… And now? It’s you saying it. The you who hadn’t believed it, and can’t believe it still. Stepping into Y6, each day is the beginning of the end, and every other the end of the beginning. A conclusion in its own right.
As the year passes, this sense of finality is only magnified. This could be the last time we’re doing this, you say. Then, you take pictures: this is the last PE lesson I’ll ever have, the last classroom lesson I’ll ever sit for. The last time I sweat it out on this court. The last time I’ll stand on stage like this. The last time I’ll ever have this waffle/chicken rice/avocado milkshake. The last article I’ll write with my friends, in this setting, ever again.
You’re trying to make these ‘last’s last, because you’re old enough to know that you want to remember, but too young to guarantee that you can. In the film and digicams, there lies a desperation to declare that our reckless and messy teenage years mattered, with the current of the future hurtling toward us.
I wish u atb for your future…
It feels so familiar, yet so different. The photos, the graduation shirts, the crying, and laughing — it does look the same as graduation from primary school and secondary school.
But we know it feels different. And it is: the junior college graduation is so much more uncertain. Before this, the path forward past the farewells was more or less linear: friends from primary school go to secondary school, and from secondary school some will go to junior college, and some to polytechnics or other schools.
In the last few months of JC, however, this linearity dissipates. People start talking about their next steps: some intend to go far away into the wide world, studying in places as far away as the United States or Europe. Even for those who look to stay in Singapore, they’ll be spread out across universities and workplaces; they might even go away on a vacation on a tropical island with a hair makeover included (Pulau Tekong).
Beyond the geographical, it feels like a whiplash when the topics of discussion get so serious. For so long, the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ was largely hypothetical; now, though, the weight of the question bears down. What and who do you want to be? We’re being asked to redefine ourselves. Your friend’s favourite subject might have been Economics, but now she’s going to become an economist.
When you say goodbye, then, you’re not just sending them off to another school in Singapore. You’re sending them off into life and the wide world, to become different people and members of society.
No wonder it feels so different.
wru, can i sign your shirt?
Across Singapore and many parts of the world, the school uniform is the defining physical symbol of being a student. It couldn’t be any less subtle: the uniform is intended to make everyone uniform, to achieve an equality.
As our years of wearing uniforms draw to a close (or at least before some of us trade our school clothes in for NS ones), it’s worth giving it a thought. With our white tops and green skirts or white pants, the visual similarity creates common identity. On top of being who we are, we signal that together we are part of this school, just like generations of seniors before us and juniors to come. Even if you’re apathetic towards the uniform itself, there’s something to be said about wearing the same thing as the friends that you’ve come to know and whom you see every day.
But as the last day of school approaches, shirts start getting passed around. They get filled up with the multicoloured scribbling of friends and teachers, that spotless white no more. Those rainbow blobs, though, carry with them many moments of laughter and tears; simple lines that could easily be expanded into full-blown essays, because how can you distill years of friendship into a few rushed signatures and lines of ink?
‘happy grad! i really miss when…’
‘thanks for being such a great friend…’
‘you’re gonna go super far…’
These colours that break up that monotonous white, then, remind you that you have never really been a mere student of Raffles Institution, the monolithic, faceless organisation. You have been a student, friend, and soul at Raffles Institution, a medley of moments, people, and memories.
We can’t help but marvel at the symbolism of it all: Even if your choice of canvas wasn’t a school blouse, everyone starts the first day of school as a pristine, blank slate, and we leave changed and never alone.
Everything about this article feels like a conclusion and not at the same time: we can’t capture these two years in a few paragraphs, for doing so might be a disservice to everything that we’ve experienced. Words are all we have to reach for meaning, even if they don’t always reach far enough.
But if there is anything that graduating has taught us, it is that maybe finding a neat conclusion isn’t the whole point. Maybe there isn’t a conclusion–maybe life is just about the in-betweens. It’s a farewell, not a goodbye — it’s a wish that we’ll all, well, fare well in whatever life has to throw at us.
And maybe it’s okay to hang on to whatever we’ve found here. Wishing that someone fares well doesn’t mean you stop being a part of their story, nor they, a part of yours. Maybe it’s okay to say, ‘I hope you fare well, and I want to be there to share that joy with you.’
Maybe those coloured shirts won’t be the remnants of an end, but the reminders of where we began.
