Twelve years ago, my father was posted here, in Wellington, so I started school here and that’s the entire origin story.
There was nothing necessarily sentimental or poetic about it, it was all simply logistics.
I entered this building at an age where my memory was unreliable.
I had the sense that everything would outlast me.
At that age, permanence felt external to me.
You assume places stay and people move.
I don’t remember my first day clearly, only the feeling of being smaller than everything around me, how the rooms felt permanent, and I wondered why I didn’t.
This year I’ll finish school in the same place.
For most people, that wouldn’t mean much but for someone raised on impermanence, where nothing is meant to stay, it feels almost implausible.
Most of the time in such cases you don’t experience growth as progress, you experience it as misalignment.
Your body changes, and your fears evolve, but the walls stay still.
The monotony becomes a measurement device, and you notice yourself by contrast.
That’s how I learned time isn’t something you pass through, it’s something that passes through you.
That’s the reason why leaving everything behind and returning mattered more to me than staying ever could.
I’ve stood in the same corridors at different stages of consciousness; once waiting to be picked up, later waiting for recess, now waiting for a life that hasn’t started yet.
Even if the space didn’t recognize the difference, I know I did.
I find there’s something severely unsettling about returning to a place that knew you before you were coherent, a place that remembers you as unfinished, while you arrive thinking you’re almost done.
I think of my father in all of this.
His posting brought us here once, and returning years later felt less like chance and more like a pattern completing itself, a symmetry that time sometimes insists on.
As a child I experience milestones as personal, but parents experience them as cumulative.
And now finally finishing school here doesn’t feel like closure, it feels like alignment.
Two points touching briefly before separating again.
I won’t miss the buildings, the bakeries, the stables, and the meadows, but I’ll miss the illusion that time can be traced so neatly.
Because now it’s moving again,
and so am I.