‘Tut, tut, child! Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’

Also known as, life the past couple of weeks:

• It’s amazing how many Union Jacks are tacked up around London at the moment. It’s almost enough to make me feel I’m stuck in a mirror house.
• I finished just two books in May, though I was reading about five. It has been many, many years since I read so little in a month. I suppose sitting your final exams of an undergraduate degree does that to you, but man. Two books. So awful, I’m making sure I don’t make that mistake this month. 
• My grades come out next week. I am very, very nervous. It has not been an easy year. I really hope I’ve passed everything and get to graduate.
• I hate that I don’t have a job lined up after graduation, and that I might have to move back home. I really, really don’t want to.
• Why are jobs so difficult to find?
• I’m kind of in love with Patti Smith after finishing Just Kids.
• London weather has really been all over the map this week.
• I did a big loop around my neighbourhood tonight because I couldn’t sit still, and I just thought, man. It’s so goddamn beautiful.
• I’m looking forward to July. I’m going on holiday and to see a lot of old friends and it’s going to be really, really great to be able to chill with them.
• It’s weird to listen to cars going by and sirens and the everyday bustle of London in the middle of the night when my little university town is normally really silent at this hour, save for the drunken singing.
• I kind of want to go dancing in an open-air space.
• Letting people go is a strange thing.

I’m a romantic, but I’m very cynical, and I’m not sure how well love and me get along. I spent today in the sun with some people. Among them a couple that has been together two years, despite never having lived in the same place for longer than a couple of months. The way they were together, the easy touches and smiles and laughter and even the bickering and disagreements was incredibly beautiful. They weren’t perfect, either apart or together. But they made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that maybe it would be nice to be in relationship. I still don’t want one, but it’s nice to know that it’s the ordinary wonder that makes my heart beat faster.

A good all-round life cure: have a friend take you to a secret garden, where you have to crawl through a hole in a fence to get in. Spend a few hours lying down in a sea of daisies, in the sun, with a few friends, playing guitar, listening to the birds, exchanging stories, and making daisy chains. There’s something about being quiet and talkative in alternate spells in nature that really just opens up my heart.

Today was a good day.

Today was also the very last class of my undergraduate degree. It also happened to be the last class of the professor who was teaching it, as he is retiring at the end of the semester. So we had cupcakes and cookies and drinks, and he gave us a pop quiz that he specifically designed to “make us feel like we didn’t know the material”, and the three top scores (I was one, hilariously) got chocolate bars. Then we all went downstairs for wine (for those who wished to partake) and a class picture of the graduating class of 2012 for English. After the picture, I spoke to a couple of my lecturers, and friends, and walked off happily to my flat to try and get some sleep. I bumped into a few friends on the way and we stood in the cold wind chatting for a half an hour.

I’ve been terrified of graduating, of not knowing what happens next, of not even knowing what country I’ll be living in come September, let alone anything else. But this morning, as I took a stroll to the supermarket minutes after it opened, and I saw the seagulls swooping low and calling out, I realised that the best thing about graduating right now is that I think I’ll be graduating on a good note. I needed closure here and I’m going to get it.

Life hasn’t ever been simple for me, and it has been quite trying for the last few years. But then there are these moments, when I just look up and can’t stop smiling and I know somewhere down the line, it will all work itself out. Or rather, I will work hard to make it work out, but I’m willing to put in the sweat.

Hope you’re doing well today. If you haven’t smiled yet, smile now. You’ll be fantastic.

I had my last class as an undergraduate student today. In a month, I will have sat my last exams, and in two months, assuming I have passed everything, I will graduate.

Fuck. Life moves fast.