Nostalgia is a bitch...

This weekend I revisited my old secondary school. What an experience. Students and staff at the Junior Lyceum (Hamrun) have been organising a bicycle marathon for quite some time now. This year, for some reason or the other, I decided that I had to go. It’s ironic to find yourself pulled towards the place that used to push you with unequivocal force around a decade before. But I decided. I had to once again see the trees that used to be our goal posts; the wall I climbed to skip school; the gate where tal-gelati used to park his truck; the bush that was persistently showered with student piss; the long corridors that I walked in everyday and the ground that felt like a stadium during league matches.

Walking in was a shock in itself. It was impressive how contrasting the memory and the place where. The first observation I made was how much the school resembled a hospital. Foucault wasn’t a name I had heard about back then. The school remained the same, bar some structural changes and relocation of some rooms. It was the same place yet it looked completely alien to me. The student volunteers felt at home. It was their place now. I was just a visitor with a temporary pass; a pass which granted me access to the corridors of the Lyceum temporarily called memory lane.

Whilst there, I managed to catch a glimpse of a couple of teachers. My eyes quickly updated out-dated memories, and the black beard of the Maltese teacher suddenly turned white. The hair of the young PE teacher was gone, and the old headmaster was now chubby and smiling. Il-Bobo, the stinky history teacher, however, remained the same.

This little visit, which lasted less than an hour, was impressive in its implications. It made me realise how much of those times I forgot. People I’ve spent hours with are now just names and a distant memory. My class mates are flashbacks with a name and a surname. That’s how we remember them. First name, plus second name. Robert - Massa, Josef - Axisa, Jeffrey -Micallef, Christopher - Spiteri, Jonathan – Azzopardi, Richard – Pace, Oscar - Baldacchino. Some of them, whom I haven’t seen in ten years are still sporting baby faces in my memory. Some have probably lost their hair, grown beards, moustaches or are sporting wedding rings. Some are undoubtedly pushing prams and paying house loans, while others are still getting high and drunk in the weekend. Sometimes I wish I’d meet them again, but I know I would have nothing to say to them. I would have nothing in common with most of them and I would not have time to spare to any of them. But it would probably be nice nonetheless. Catching up is great till it hits you that time is really on amphetamines, and the illusion that it goes slow when you’re at work is just there to mess with you.

The teachers are probably all the same, only older. Most of them, whose job was to provide me with an education, are now distant faces. Some lack a name, others even a surname. Their existence, which was once the source of my frustrations, has no relevance whatsoever now. I can even sympathise with their efforts. They’re not my enemies now, some of them I still despise, even if I can understand that they were, and probably are, just regular Joes trying to earn a living.

I was part of that institution for five years. Not too much, in the scheme of things. Crucial time though. I entered that school as a scared 11 year old and went out as a smoking cocky teenage rocker with no idea of what I wanted to become. Behind the corner was a turning point that was to come in a year’s time, one that would change the course of those ten years in a radical manner. A turning point that leads here. But that’s a different story…