Pomp and Circumstance

A couple weeks ago, my little brother graduated from high school. Bryce has the world ahead of him. After being heavily recruited by several Ivy League schools, he decided to enroll at Yale in the fall.

But Bryce is tremendously nostalgic. He used to cry when my mom bought him new shoes because he felt bad for the old ones, and he became depressed every new years because he missed the old year. Just last month, he hid my mom's old electric mixer in his bathroom because he was upset she was going to throw it away.

Needless to say, he had a hard time during graduation. I didn't have any words of wisdom for him. When I graduated high school, I was so antsy to get to college I could barely sit through the ceremony. The only reason I was upset was because I had to wait an entire summer before I could move to Madison.

But I thought of him again about a week after his graduation. It was about 6:30 on a Wednesday night and I'd just gotten off the metro at McPherson Square and was walking to my kickball game. The McPherson stop lets off into what looks like a courtyard, and I had to walk through an archway to get to the Washington Monument where we play.

The sun was sitting and a sappy end-of-movie-like song was playing on my ipod. This was my moment. When the camera slowly zooms out as the sun casts a golden halo around my head and you smile knowing that the transition's over. She's made it in a new city.

Of course, that doesn't happen. You can't see yourself from outside, and life doesn't just zoom into nowhere. So I turned off my ipod, played kickball, got a few drinks, and went home to bed.

My family watches a lot of movies, so much so that I think sometimes we actually expect these things to happen.

But I realized that when I have those movie-esque moments, they're not at the moments you think they'd be. I don't remember accepting my diploma when I graduated high school. When I think back to my high school graduation, all I remember was trying to decide whether or not I was going to throw my hat up at the end, because they told us we weren't allowed to.

My most vivid memory from my college graduation was my friend writing obscenities in the program, and hoping that Jeff saved his unblemished copy.

I don't remember the first time I unlocked my new apartment in DC. When I think back to my first night in the city, I remember rushing my guinea pig to the hospital at 10 p.m. before my first day of work because she swallowed a bead off my necklace.

I know what my brother went through that weekend. When you know something's going to end, you try so hard to feel every moment so you can hang onto it forever. But you never do.

I wish I would've told my brother not to try too hard, because you never know exactly what you're going to remember anyway.

Maybe some day, when he graduates from Yale, he'll think back to his high school graduation and all he'll be able to remember will be a random line from someone's speech, or how he told me ten times to change my outfit because the hemline was uneven. Then maybe he'll remember this blog post. But I doubt it.