Lately, I start crying when I put on music in the shower. I don’t know why. It wouldn’t be right to call it sadness, because sadness usually has a reason. This is more like numbness. Nothing stirs in my head. I have so much to do, graduation is coming up, and yet I lie in bed. A kind of inertia I can’t shake off.

I know this feeling. The two years before my HSC were just like this. Back then, too, I couldn’t think about anything, and my mind kept drifting back to class eight.

Toward the end of class eight, before the JSC, the school started holding exams every day. I never took them seriously. I’d write half an answer and leave. Sometimes I’d finish early and feed answers to the others, and the teacher would send me out of the classroom.

After the exams, a friend and I would walk around campus. The afternoon light was fading; we’d do laps and talk about all kinds of nonsense. I don’t remember most of what we said. I just remember how good it felt. I genuinely liked walking, and I liked expressing myself with someone whose mind worked like mine. In all these years, the only person who’s come close is probably Rida. Though he’s much more annoying.

I’d only just started listening to Shironamhin. I thought the lines “You’re looking at me, so I walk down the road” had been written about us. Peak childishness.

There was a girl in the picture, too. She’d walk around campus with her friends. Doing a few laps, I’d see her two or three times. I wondered if she noticed me the way I noticed her.

It wasn’t that life was easy back then. Exams were coming, my preparation was so-so, and sometimes I panicked. I was alone most of the time. But I never felt lonely. Looking back now, it seems like there was always something going on inside me. Looking at the sky made me feel something. So did listening to music. One conversation could keep my mind occupied all evening.

The loneliness I feel now isn’t really about not having people around. I can’t even reach myself anymore. Something is happening inside me, but I can’t hear it.

I later fell in love with that girl. She was there for me in the time before my HSC. I tried a few times to tell her what was going on, but couldn’t. Back then, I thought she just didn’t understand. Now I wonder how I could have explained something I didn’t understand myself. Besides, my life was divided into separate compartments. She was in one, these feelings in another. I never built a door between them. Two people can be close and still drift apart, just because one of them never found the words.

This song somehow brings back that old feeling.

"Someone, somewhere, lit a light out of love, and the sun went dark.
I wander, chasing my own shadow, for nothing; one day I look up and find myself lost to you."

The first time it came to me was just before school ended. This time, it’s come just before student life ends. Maybe the ache was never really for class eight. Maybe it comes whenever a chapter of life is about to close. I can feel time slipping through my hands, and still I haven’t figured out what that time really was.

The life ahead may be much more interesting. Still, the nostalgia I feel for the life behind me seems deeper. Maybe because what’s over can’t get any worse. But the future is entirely unknown, and full of pressure and expectation.

I don’t know how much of this peak nostalgia is real and how much I’ve exaggerated in my imagination.

Sometimes I want to take my case to God. But to bring a case, you need a complaint. What am I actually complaining about? And to whom? People talk to God. I don’t know if God exists. Even if He does, I think I’d just stand there in silence, because I don’t have the words for what I want to say.

I somehow made it through my HSC. Maybe I’ll make it through this too.