For those of us who have never been blessed with the kindest of experiences, it is easy to forget. This holds and truer in the days and years that pass after spending half of our lifetime chasing the gratification of an education.
To learn, as it has been predetermined, was never meant to be easy. There is, for some, an innate inability to retain formulas at ease or recite a speech with conviction. For others, they had to carry on a quiet struggle in trying to keep up in rooms that never felt built for them. We've spent years working on projects and activities that consumed days and nights—only to now rest in boxes or a folder on a hard drive. There were hours of long commute, and the silent cries of exhaustion on the way home.
As wide-eyed students, we were expected to debate the world’s most complex problems even as we were still trying to understand our own place in it. Every step forward—or backward—carried weight. And even as institutions and systems shift, one thing has remained: to be a student is to be shaped and shaken by expectation.
As soon as everything culminates—at the grasp of your degree or a medal resting on your shoulders—there begins quiet healing. The structure of the school no longer constrains us. We can choose to take what resonates from our experience and leave behind the pain that built it. We can forget many things: the menu of the cafeteria, the routine schedule of classes, or the faces and names of our teachers.
And yet,
We made a memory out of this.
We are reminded that even though we’ve left the grasp of the four walls of our school, there is someone who is left behind. Your teacher. The one who stood alongside you as you amassed all you’ve learned.
They will carry the version of you that you will slowly forget:
Your acts of kindness or the burst of defiance.
Your mistakes and the eventual triumphs.
The stutter, and the laughter that came in your unknowing.
Your right answer after the third wrong one.
All of it combined, in a memory of what has amassed to bring meaning to their lives as they persist to teach the next of us, who have forgotten. These are the embers of yesterday that move our world to be a little kinder and beautiful.
It is these exact moments that Kalpesh Desai’s poetry in Jasmines in Our Hair sought to echo: the mending of memory and of passing time as we heal and grow. As we lose sight of experiences that aren’t as pretty and self-serving, we forget what it means within the comfort of the villages that raised us. As Desai’s words put us into this discomfort, it might just give us enough space to celebrate the release from our past while still treasuring what came before.
Looking forward has never meant looking past: it has always been about looking back at the cracks of our journey and simply choosing to leap further each day.
As we move forward with our lives, we leave school behind as just a phase we passed through. But for every student who moves on, there is a teacher who stays behind. Kalpesh Desai’s poem, Made a Memory Out of This, is the reminder we need in a world that increasingly calls us to be self-centered and individualistic. We, as humans, do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, we are beings who are fated to be relational and communal in all we are and do.
So perhaps, even in this moment, we can pause to appreciate it all—our teachers and all the people in our lives who had us in both good and bad—and how it shaped who we are today.
by Raine Goco