At times like this texts about the occasion tend to be like TV soaps. Too long, too soppy and not very true. At times like this, of recapitulation and synthesis, the temptation is too recall only the best things that happened. Like writing a student course ribbon. There’s not enough time and it flies by. Study, work, dinners, meetings, training period, Masters thesis, the Pope comes and the Pope goes. And in the middle, as if we had time to stop and think, someone keeps on stuffing bits of cloth into our hands and expecting us to write, in half a dozen lines, what we have lived through over the last six years. And when we are thinking about what to write, about what to say, what turns up are always those usual occasions that we would like to read in a few years time to recall how the course was such a pleasure from the beginning to the end. For some people we leave emotional dedications of love and eternal friendship – even though we know that in many cases eternity only lasts a few months. For other colleagues, wishes for happiness and memories of some inebriated moment together – which, let’s be honest, was the way we found to get through most of the course. We rarely recall that on these occasions we are like TV soaps. Everything was beautiful, everything was easy. No it wasn’t. We suffered. All of us. We were afraid. We had doubts. It doesn’t matter, because we got to the end. Which, to be truthful, is not a heroic feat, as others have done it before us, and many of them better. This is why I do not attach any special charm to this date. Sociology tends to be curious. We talk to people to whom we hardly deigned to speak to for years and some group aura makes us feel like we belong to some imaginary group of final year graduates. Perhaps on facebook. What is of least importance to me is the blessing, the burning or whatever it means. What is of interest to me is that I laughed and cried for six years (yes, I know, a man doesn’t cry. Damn!), suffered and got over it. That I was wrong, often and greatly. That, having reached the end, the net result, besides being positive, is eternal. More than a strip of cloth. On the day of the blessing, what matters least is the blessing, but the way we got there. Individually. It is less important to me that we have something in common because we have completed a course, but that we cannot see it as belonging to everyone because no one would have done it like this. There are things that you can’t write on a strip of cloth, that you cannot put in a text because we have come to the end of a course. There are things that deserve to be lived. Or, as that poet of misfortune we remember too little Kurt Cobain might say, ‘I’d rather be hated for what I am, than loved for what I m not.’

Gustavo Jesus
gustavonjesus@gmail.com