Traditionally, on Midsummer night, you should gather seven flowers and place them under your pillow for the night, so that you could see your future spouse in your dreams. But I think I'll rather go dancing.
I feel like I've finally caught up with summer. This morning I woke up early and walked the almost-empty streets of Helsinki. Summer mornings are what I love most about Helsinki. The sea, the breeze.
(Days are warm and windy. I've been working and travelling by train and sleeping in. And playing the ukulele and listening to a lot of bossa nova. I've been reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, and rereading Katherine Mansfield's short stories and a lot of Salinger. What have you been reading lately?)
Here we are, then. Is this how one is supposed to feel afterwards? After the end of life as we know it, after twelve years of education.
Far too many flowers and presents. A silly hat and ultimately quite painful shoes and the most beautiful dress. And in the evening, dinner with friends over the rooftops of Helsinki, drinks, dancing, wandering about, crashing into bed with the birds singing at sunrise.
free, adjective 1 able to act or or be done as one wishes; not under the control of another 2 (often as complement) not or no longer confined or imprisoned
A confession: I'm scared.
I'm trying to find my footing, trying to find something to do, something to be.
But first, a summer. I'll find myself a ukulele, get back to playing. Take up swimming. Do the things that make me happy and try to figure out what exactly I plan to do with my life now that I'm almost unbearably free.
This is my chosen theme tune for my graduation. Hopeful, wistful. Beautiful.
I graduate tomorrow.
I can't believe how fast those three years passed, and how much I managed to grow in that crackle of time.
So allow me a few moments of nostalgia.
The past few months have been all worrying over exams and summer jobs and everything that comes after graduation, after our lives are blown apart. After the end of mapped-out, planned-ahead life.
The past few days have been tears and rehearsals and disbelief. Cleaning and cooking and receiving far too many cards and flowers.
But the past few years. Three to be exact. They have smashed me into pieces and helped me build myself up again.
I have become a better writer, I think. A better student, maybe. A better friend, certainly.
These are the things I will miss.
My teachers.
The classrooms and the corridors, the stages and the stairs.
The performances. The endless enthusiasm, the constant outpouring of ideas.
The buzz beneath the mundane, the excitement of being a part of something.
That sense of belonging.
The streets of Kallio: the drunks and the hipsters, the cafés and the dodgy bars, the flowers and the vomit stains, the erotica shops and the beautiful library. The trams and the seagulls.
And, finally. My friends.
Because the friends I have found in and around Kallio, the people we've gathered into our mutual orbit, these are the people I don't want to let go of. This is the most difficult, terrifying thing about graduating. This fear of loss.
(But I think my fear is mostly unfounded. A bit premature. We have all summer, after all. These three glorious months.)
Before I start crying: I think these are the years I might miss later on.
When I was little, my mother said about missing things and people: It's how you know you care. It's how you know you had a good time. It's a sign of love.
