The Last Day

I have cried at the end of every school year for twenty-eight years. This is not something I try to hide, because by June the children know me well enough that pretending would seem stranger than crying, and also I gave up pretending around the fifteenth year.

It is not sadness, mostly. It's something more like the feeling of something that existed completely for a specific period of time ceasing to exist in that form. The class of 2019 existed as itself from September to June and then it didn't. The specific combination of those twenty-two children, the particular conversations we had, the jokes that only made sense within those walls — that was a thing that will never occur again in exactly that way.

I've had more than five hundred children through my classroom. I remember most of their names. Some of them have children of their own now who come to my class, which is a thing I find remarkable every time it happens.

Last June, a boy named Stavros who cried every September morning for the first three weeks in 2010 came back to collect his own son on the last day. He's a fisherman now, large hands, quiet like his father was quiet. His son had not cried once all year. He told me this like it was an achievement of his own, which I suppose it was.

I cried after they left. That was probably about more than one thing.

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