I HAVE always thrived on distinctions. Curating playlists to close a year. Wearing a pair of lucky socks on final exam days. These little rituals and private ceremonies have shaped my life, molding the fluidity of time into truths I can hold. With the loss of physicality in a pandemic-ridden world, I mourn for much larger losses that I can no longer name. It feels as if all the grief, anger, and anxiety have atomized in the same parts of me that house my capacity to hope, laugh, and choose joy.

Although one cannot talk of COVID-19 without acknowledging the deeply rooted inequalities magnified by the pandemic, a feeling we all can claim is ours is the collective grief of instability. For graduating students, our university life is eclipsed by a sadness that is too bloated, ugly and formless for words. It is difficult to reconcile personal sadness with the political, to mourn for ourselves while thousands of people are swallowed into statistics: Positive COVID-19 cases, recovered cases, backlogs. Even as I write this, I can’t help but feel bogged down by the futility of articulating a bleakness that envelopes us all. 

I’ve spent the past year imagining what it would be like to navigate a world wherein every surface was not always a potential petri dish for COVID-19. In these imaginings, it becomes clearer that what I pine for the most from a pre-pandemic world are the possibilities of life. I was one of those students who found refuge in how school could be a great equalizer. At school, you could dissolve into all these rituals that made student life so exciting. In the same vein, extracurriculars were these great spaces for possibility and learning beyond theory within the classroom.

Now, against the backdrop of Zoom, these opportunities of escapism feel volatile. As if—at closing a tab—the red tape of reality is ushered in immediately and any approximations of normalcy feel like inauthentic representations of a life lost. 

After over a year in community quarantines and synchronous sessions with faceless classmates, sometimes it feels like I’ve accumulated centuries’ worth of human love in my veins. At the slightest touch, I’m ready to inject it into the bloodstream of anyone willing to listen.

Ultimately, that’s what I miss the most: The possibility of having someone listen. The warmth of another stranger’s body. The thicket of tension at Dela Costa as students line up for oral exams with crumpled index cards in hand. The suffocating heat of Bellarmine classrooms. Feeling cocooned in a mass of sweaty, anxious bodies pulsing with youth and the arrogance of time. I miss the distinctions, rites, memories—a life colored by the participation of another.

As the first graduating class of an entire year in online school, celebration may feel ornamental at best.

Pursuing higher education at all is a right unfortunately withheld as a privilege in the Philippines, and to graduate is an honor in itself. Yet I feel insatiable for wanting more. I am deeply thankful to have continued my education in the midst of a pandemic but truthfully, I am still mourning. Without the physical ceremony of a graduation, I feel stagnated. I’m unsure of how to live without feeling as if I’m chasing for a world that no longer exists.

I do not know how to say goodbye.

Regardless, I will still try. To my fellow graduates, our generation is inheriting a world that requires the difficult work of choosing joy and nurturing hope to reimagine a better one. We leave Ateneo with a more tempered understanding of what it means to participate in each other’s lives and care for our communities. We exit with the capacity to channel our grief into action for those who do not have the privilege of time and space to grieve at all. There is still so much we do not know but until we can all scream, laugh, and weep together in a sea of blue with all our family as witness, chosen and blood—to celebrate is to persist.

Sofia K. Guanzon (AB Dip-IR ‘21) was an Inquiry Staffer of The GUIDON in AY 2018-2019 and AY 2019-2020. She may be reached at sofia.guanzon@obf.ateneo.edu.