The lights shone bright into my eyes. I looked forward into the distance and saw, beyond the blinding lights, an entire roomful of people sitting still and silent. People of all ages, race, gender and cultural backgrounds, with their eyes fixated on me as I stood on the vast stage. A podium stands before me and on it, a couple of pages of a speech I had written only two days prior. On those couple of pages were printed words that represented my heart and soul at that point in my life. It contained memories, anecdotes, thoughts, jokes and laments. Most important of all, it was the first speech I had ever written that was meant to be communicated to a large public. It was hard uttering the first sentence, with so many eyes examining me that an acute pang of stage fright almost overwhelmed me. But once I uttered the first word, the rest followed like clockwork. I dedicated the speech to my grandmother, whose life was rapidly slipping away as she was terminally ill with leukemia. I felt grateful that she would at least have the chance to know that I stood there on that stage. By the end of my speech, the entire room was filled with the deafening sound of applause. I could barely see, only hear the standing ovation that was given to me by the crowd. “It was one of the most successful and touching valedictory speeches ever given,” said one teacher. The people amongst the crowd included people I admired, people I loved, people I was friends with and people who have supported me all my life. That all happened on June 20, 2006, the day of my graduation from high school. I was 15 years old by the time I graduated from high school. What did I know about being the voice of our graduating class?
As I stepped down that stage after being handed the Governor General’s Award for Academic Merit, I went past a mirror and for a brief moment I looked at my own reflection. The young boy looking back at me is one teetering on that murky edge separating childhood from adulthood. I thought to myself: “How did I ever get here, in this room, with all these people applauding me?” Everything that went before it seemed so far away, so radically different from what I was then. “How did it come to this?” was the question nudging me at the back of my brain. Only a year before, I was one of the most notorious students in school with no foreseeable future. How did I ever get to be where I was, having the chance to communicate my heart and soul to such a receptive crowd?
To define that moment of my life as meaningful would be a vast understatement. There is no way to communicate in words what that moment meant for me, my family and my closest friends. I didn’t want to look back, for that moment was too enchanting and spellbinding. But it was my past that got me there even though it was a past that I could not remember without feeling bittersweet. It is said that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. I guess the past would always be by our side, whether we choose to ignore it or not. It makes us who we are and constitute the building blocks of our being. As for my past, it certainly is one I can never hope to forget.
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