23 Oct 2018

The end of high school comes with a bunch of confusing emotions. Even if you didn’t have the best time over the past six years, you start to get sentimental over the smallest shit like the walk to the train station, the silliness of science class and forgetting your PE uniform for the fifth week in a row.

I remember thinking I’d even miss all the annoying Year 7’s blocking all the corridors with their comically large backpacks.

Like many of you, I wrote a bucket list when I started to realise the next few months at school would be the last. Things were about to change hectically and I wanted to make the most of my final years at the place I had spent most of my life.

I made plans to stage a mass jig day with my year. I started a blog to document my final days. I mapped out when my last class for each subject was, my last basketball game, my last free period, even the last assembly of the year. We organised parties, dress-ups, pranks and piss-ups.

I wanted to do all that stereotypical shit you see in movies, like have a food fight and bury a time capsule and stand up to the school bully and spontaneously break out into song. Nothing was too ambitious or cheesy for my bucket list.

Of course, I finished that year only having done about half of those things.

The thing is, I was simply too preoccupied with what was happening in front of me to think about some grand plans I concocted in the shower the week before.

I did make awesome memories in that time but they were spontaneous moments fuelled by the all the emotions we were feeling about leaving. We didn’t need to follow a list for that.

There was something great about letting the moment dictate what we did and sometimes it was just to do what we always did.

Sure, I might not remember exactly what my friends and I talked about by the old tree stump in our last free period, but what good would a food fight have been?

Even if I got a sweet photo with tomato juice all over me, it wouldn’t have represented my school experience as a whole. And I’d much rather have a vague memory of that warm feeling of chatting shit with my mates than a stained shirt.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the things I did because of the bucket list were amazing, and I’m happy I forced myself to do things I wouldn’t have otherwise. But I’m glad I didn’t let it take priority.

School’s a fun time, but so is afterwards. I’ve since checked off a few more items on that bucket list–with some of those same friends from school–but it came naturally rather than being a manufactured moment.