Gazillion Days - Single Day In History (by breannastarfish)

MORNING

I wake up in the din and clatter of house guests. Unlike everyone I know who will join me today in graduating from a four-year private college, my family is too cheap (to be fair, poor) to spring for a hotel room.

And so my mother, brother and sisters are here in my tiny apartment, already making demands for sustenance and entertainment before I've even pulled back the covers. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for their emotional support. Okay, so maybe I do.

I stumble into the kitchen and make some coffee, dumping the remainder of my mother's weak Folger's into the sink. She protests. I ignore her. I have less than an hour to wake up, dress up, organize the troops, and get my face to look like I haven't been sleep deprived for past three months, for a day full of unwanted photo ops and awkward social interactions. Congratulations, I tell myself, and pour myself a cup.

AFTERNOON

I abandon my family with the other waiting spectators with not a small amount of relief. Now might be the time to mention that I really don't want to do this.

College was great, sure, and I am marginally proud of myself, but I've never been one for ceremony. The whole thing strikes me as rather pointless. But my mother wants me to do this. Show the kids the awesomeness of higher education. Or whatever.

I am thinking this as I am hiding behind the church, all capped and gowned, smoking a much-needed cigarette. The role model thing, unfortunately, is fifty percent pretense. I go into the church basement, where they are lining us up, barking directions. No one, it seems, is listening.

We are all too baffled, frightened and amused, and struck with some strange desire to greet each other smiling, to hug everyone, including people we don't really know, or never really liked.

EVENING

The highlight of the ceremony is its brevity. Given that my graduating class is the largest group of atheists I've ever seen in one place, it's strange that that place is one of the oldest churches in Manhattan.

I don't trip when they called my name, and we all get out of there quickly. There is a reception, a large crowd packed into a small room, and the bizarre friendliness of the church basement is only furthered by the wine bar. After I have embraced more people than in the past four years combined, and snuck four glasses of wine past my mother's watchful eye, we go to dinner with my boyfriend and his family.

Besides Mother's brooding (I guess I offend her somewhere along the line, because between the reception and the dinner she manages to pull me aside, and tell me, not for the first time, that I was the most selfish person ever to pass through her womb), everything went off without a hitch. Congratulations, I tell myself as I fall sleep. You made it through the day.

THE END

Unique Day

of a Freelancer
from Cdo

Unique Day

of a Student
from Brooklyn

Take the time to write, become a writer, keep your memories alive by writing them down, we offer you the tools to write, writing your stories have never been easier, in a few days you'll become the writer you always wanted to be,