Generations of this family wove back to the time when “Your ancestors made a home here”, as my father would proudly boast. Whenever someone would get married, a new house was built across the field or up the road, branching out like a physical manifestation of a family tree.
Childhood had been an easy mess, chasing and tagging from one house to another with piles of cousins and second cousins and kids assumed to be related somehow. As a child, I was always up. Perched on a fencepost just high enough to escape being tagged, hiding up one of the few scraggly trees the island had to offer, or sitting meditatively on the rooftop trying to chatter with my namesakes.
My father had always called me his “little bluejay” when I snuggled on his lap to get warm. He told me how I was born still holding my breath, turning all blue. My mother, forehead still sweaty, had scoffed at the idea of naming their child Blue. So the compromise was Jay, a nod to the raucous blue birds. Even now, whenever I get cold my lips and fingertips turn a faint blue.
When festival season came around my father would perch me on his shoulders so I could watch the swarm of people, those familiar and strange crowds. From that same vantage point I watched the races. From my gentle, childhood gaze, it had all been great fun. Like watching cousin Sam and uncle Jack get in a fistfight over who was better at catching bugs.. It was violent and exciting, but at the end of the day everyone went home to wipe blood off their noses.
The first year I was too big to sit on my father's shoulders was the first year I saw a body carried off the beach. Something churned along my spine, and from then on I watched the races only because I felt a sense of duty to the island. I watched because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
Last year, I had another reason to watch. Beth was riding.
Beth and I had been born weeks apart, and spent every moment together since. When we were teens we found this abandoned fishing shack, twisted and collapsing in a hollow near the beach. The wood was felted from the abusive weather and torn fishing nets mouldered in heaps. We had scavenged the dump to find a table that was missing a leg and two mismatched chairs. We nailed scrap wood over the worst holes, keeping most of the weather out.
It was here that we sat around the table with one driftwood leg, smoking cheap cigarettes, and cautiously talked about our future. In our family, you didn’t talk about leaving the island. With all the effort our ancestors put into getting here, how could we even think about leaving? It had already been decided where our houses were going to be built when we settled down. To speak of a future that wasn’t on this island was taboo.
Despite this, we both whispered about how we weren’t meant for this island. And no one but ourselves would help us leave.
Beth hadn’t told me she was entering the races. We spent less time in the fishing hut, but she claimed that her family needed her around to watch her younger siblings and help sew stuffed horses for tourists.
I didn’t know until the day before the races For the first time in a while, we met at the shack.
“I’m riding in the races.’ She said, nervously, rapping her knuckles on the table to knock ash off the end of her cigarette.
I choked on the smoke in surprise, and wheezed out a “What?” when I managed to stop coughing.
“If I win, the money will get us one step closer to getting off Thisby.” She said, leaning forward intensly.
“But why wouldn’t you tell me?” Standing, I flung the remain of my cigarette down and kicked it out.
“I didn’t want to jinx it.” Beth put her own cigarette out.
“I would have ridden with you.” I whispered.
She rose to stand face to face with me. “I know.”
I knew the island had been listening, and maybe that’s why it was me who first recognized the body that was tangled in the rocks and surf. Beth, my best friend since before either of us could hold our heads upright. Aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings and parents all slid and clambered onto the beach. We thrashed our way through the shallows and pulled her to shore, rolling her over to free the water from her lungs.
Once she was carried to a warm house and fed soup by what seemed a dozen grandparents, she confessed to the pain in her ankle. The stirrup hadn’t come free soon enough after her cappal lunged for the sea. Wincing, I turned away when the doctor came to set her broken ankle, full of wrong angles and distended by swelling.
Once Beth stopped limping, none of us mentioned the races again. We didn’t go to watch them, and only went to the festival to convince tourists that we sold memories that were too precious not to take home with them.
It was the first of November, and we both sat in the silent darkness of the shack. We often sat in pleasant silence, listening to the distant waves. But tonight it was dangerous out here, so close the November night, so close to the sea. Tonight our silence was heavy.
“You’re going to race, aren’t you.” Beth said, the same moment I drew a breath to tell her.
“Yes.” I said instead.
We didn’t say another word, because the island was listening.
The preliminary examination week was surely a week full of “firsts” for me, especially now that I am a college student—which hasn’t really sunk into my head until then. During that week, I got to experience what students always despise during exams—time pressure. It wasn’t my first time to experience it, though, because high school, of course, sure wouldn’t have passed if it had never let me face time pressure. Requirements were piled, schedules were jam-packed, and teachers didn’t give any consideration for deadlines. Due to these circumstances, I then used to think that high school was giving me the same level of pressure as to what college students are currently receiving, or so that was what people told me. However, even if the majority of the people whom I asked college tips from often said that time pressure allows improvement in fast analyzations and computations, I strongly do not believe that it hasn’t worked out for me just yet. The first two—almost three—months of college has already thrown me with more tasks than the usual weight of workload that I can handle, but I have noticed that the mistakes I’ve done in the processes of accomplishing such are significantly taking me higher than my former perspectives when it comes to studying. A few of the aforementioned “firsts” that I experienced are the following:
It was my first time to submit my answer sheet filled out with the product of not listening to the instructions given. I am particularly referring to our only major subject which is Pharmacy 1.
It was my first time to take exams with an answer sheet (scantron) that was to be checked by a machine, and so I thought that shading my chosen answer out of the choices provided was a big deal. Although it really is a big of a deal (because otherwise, the machine might consider your answer wrong if you shaded it inappropriately), I still spent most of my time slowly shading the rectangles properly rather than going through the questions and answering them correctly as fast as I can. Some of my high school quizzes and exams were also answered on answer sheets that contained circles that were to be shaded, and our teachers would often “scare” us that shading one circle incorrectly would affect all the other items that followed. But eventually, those quizzes and exams were only checked “manually” and were sometimes even biased by teachers who had their so-called “favorite students”.
It was only after the preliminary examination week had I realized that being competitive with my test results and quiz scores and comparing them with what my blockmates got are unbelievably not worth it at all.
And so the following week, we received our respective examination results during our scheduled classes of all our subjects. To my surprise, I got higher scores than what I expected to get. (Note, though: I got served with what I deserved in Pharmacy 1.) One would usually be glad to have received high grades, but to me, they aren’t enough. After all, grades don’t really define who you are as a person, but they sure will carry you to a position where the qualifications are usually grades and all other academic performances.
Last Tuesday, July 28, 2015, I picked up one of the most memorable quotations that I know I will hold on to for a long time, and that is what Sir Ricky, our adviser, said right after he discussed the correct answers of our Biology 13 Laboratory preliminary examination: “Don’t just memorize; also remember to analyze.” After all, how else are we, students, going to learn if all we do is master lengthy piles of notes without learning them off by heart? If this is what we continue to do, then we are a hundred percent guaranteed with a great loss of knowledge that could have been stored in our brains, which can also be applied to life’s greater problems and lessons in the near future.
I have stated that I cannot and will never truly succeed by just memorizing, but this alone is not what I am intending to type in order to share to you, dear reader/s. I am also open to talking about the times wherein I was the one embarrassed and personally confronted with my mistakes in front of my classmates/blockmates in order for them to learn from it. Indeed, “The experience of others is the best teacher.” However, I am slowly but surely getting to the point where I will no longer have to worry about what my failure can make other people think wrongly of me every time I am corrected. Because what better way is there for me to learn and to grow from my mistakes?
The last thing that that I have realized after the preliminary examinations is accepting defeat. You might be thinking that failure and defeat are just referring to one same thing, but for me, they aren’t. They are distinguished with great differences. Failure, in my opinion, is when you disappoint others (especially your parents) with what you got served, while defeat is when you disappoint yourself with the outcome of how you performed. It’s not a question of understanding if you can’t seem to get what I mean, because it’s only my opinion and that’s how I perceive it.
To sum it all up, college exams are not what I used to think of them when I was still in high school. These realizations, I believe, have certainly changed the way that I will take the examinations that await me in the months to come. And if I were to be asked for tips, specifically for future college freshmen, I’d say, firmly and without a doubt, “Expect the unexpected.”
