All Together Now

Published in the 2003 Mount Gambier High School Magazine

We were all sitting up in one of the science labs, somewhere towards the beginning of August, when the feeling of bizarre ease first came upon me—this realisation, this sense of calm. We had been herded, like cattle, into a SATAC information session, and as we sat there, listening to the numbing monotony of what was being said, I realised pleasantly, for the first time, that we were all in this together. It sounds sentimental, and it sounds pathetic. But it's also very true.

'This is nice,' I thought at the time. 'It's like we're the gang from Happy Days. Or at the very least, from American Pie.'

The thing is, you see (and this is what had dawned upon me that morning in the labs), is that for all our differences, when we get to that final year of school, everyone has one fundamental thing in common—a shared sense of general unhappiness.

Life in year twelve is in theory very simple. We eat, we sleep and we bust our balls trying to meet the ludicrous number of deadlines that lie around us on the ground like the fetid, rotting corpses that they are. The only constant and unchanging variables in this baron landscape of matriculation are our schoolmates, our classmates. Regardless of whether or not you knew them in your everyday life, or for the first four years of secondary schooling before this one, these are the people you live with, everyday, and for that reason, they are like family. One big, depressed, dying family.

The question I repeatedly find myself asking is whether or not this family thing we've got going is going to actually last beyond the final exam. The problem is that from here on in, our shared present is going to become a shared past, and a shared past isn't good for anyone, especially not for those who lived their lives through their schooling (either as an academic, or as a drunken socialite). Where do the wunderkinds and the teen queens live out the enormous promise of their schooldays when they get out there, into the 'real world'?

Believe it or not, but this isn't a depressive, pessimistic or gloomy little piece of writing—it's actually full of optimism, as strange as that may seem. While I don't think that our current 'happy family' thing is going to last beyond the hazy aftermath of the formal, and while the thought of a garish reunion with you people ten years from now makes me want to roll over and die, I am happy that, for this brief instant in time, we were able to share a moment or two together, hold each other up in good times and in bad, and coexist together in a world of stressed-out solidarity.

As I noted in the labs that chilly August morning, we were all in this together. And for what it's all worth, as we move off into the next phase of our separate lives, I'm actually really glad.