All Dem Nuns Be Making Me Go Soft.

Life has been taking more of a life-y pace lately, slowing down at all the right times and speeding up when you don’t need it to linger, kind of like ballroom dancing with a sumo wrestler; in the sense that the guy is big enough to slow the earth’s revolution while showing surprising agility that works just right when you least expect it to.

The exams are going considerably well, even though I still can’t get my head around the fact that I’m graduating. School mates aren’t  hostile for a change and everything has taken more of that malleable, passive aggressive, social-friendly air that only comes in preparation for nostalgia’s crash course.

I’m pretty sure a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have been able to think of two things that I’m going to miss about that place, but to my pleasant surprise, the list is filling up pretty quickly. Granted, a lot of things were consistent about not having a snowman’s chance in hell to making it on that list, like for instance the competitive mini-Stalins running around disguised as teenage chicks. Man, I’d rather have my eyebrows plucked by a blind Asian seamstress till the apocalyptic horns sound than see them again. However, some squeezed through. Least expected was this; I’m going to miss the nuns.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Growing up, they looked like this:

They wait for us each morning in front of the scarily official, nightmare-of-a-surrogate-school-gates, being the only comforting faces in a crowd of blue collar oppressed maniacs that seem to detest us for the sole reason that we dare to breathe their rightfully-claimed, government-approved air. I don’t know about you, but moral support doesn’t come in a more fluffy package. I mean come on, loud joking nuns, it can’t get better than that. All I had to do when I was lost the first day was follow the all too familiar Lebanese accent back to shore. Is it weird that I can’t grasp the idea of going to an educational institution that doesn’t have eccentric nuns? How else is it going to feel like home? Don’t be too surprised, I can’t recognize myself either. Who would have thought I’d miss the same bubble I’ve wanted to burst for so long now?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, I’m still two exams into the whole mess, but I guess that’s how the realizations ebb in, you know? Little by little, one creeping in every other day in indiscernible packages that sift through your conscious, like how I’ll never be sneaking into the storage room and playing that ancient piano that everybody forgot about again, or how I’ll never have to trade my Nutella sandwiches for cheese sandwiches, or how I won’t have to sit down and memorize all those Lebanese hymns for the annual Christmas recital again, even though I never really could keep it in there for longer than a couple of days, making sure to get the accent just right so the head nun (ma mère) would be happy then deciding that the rest of the corny choir will sing over me while I mumble blissfully, or how I’ll never be hearing Sister Tacla’s beginning of the year speech or make jokes about how she always manages to shove in her signature metaphor of ‘You’re the soul of this premises, without you it’d be a lifeless body and so would I.’

When did it go by so fast?

Maybe I am a little too old-fashioned after all, but hell, sue me. Look at me getting all mushy. Heh.