keep calm and carry on

10 minutes to go.  A slight trickle of perspiration fell slowly down my neck as I looked up.  Stern.  The austere stares that confronted me did little to hide the nerves; no happy times now, no drunken shenanigans down the pub.  This is serious.  This defines lives.

Why we all tried to hide it I have no idea.  It was a case of proving we weren’t scared, showing we were the ones for who this didn’t matter, looking at ease.  But the tension was palpable in the way it gripped all our stomachs and in the silence that preserved every second as an eternity.  I tried riding over it with a sly grin.  It didn’t work.  There was solidarity at least.  We had trained for this.  We had trained and trained.  And the half jovial nature of the reassurances that had pervaded conversation previously showed how much we all wanted each other to get through this.  We were all in this together.  But then what use is solidarity in a battle?  There will either be a bullet, or a shell, or a bomb with your name on it, or there won’t be.  That’s just the long and short of it.  But there is no use thinking like that.  Not today.

This was always going to happen.  I knew it was coming –we all knew- but somehow it always seemed so far away.  It was out of reach for so long.  Then it was upon all of us so quickly.  Sometimes the most obvious things in the World are the ones that we are blind to.  For fear I put it to the back of my mind.  But now, on such a day as this, I wish I hadn’t.  But then there is always more you could have done, isn’t there?  I just went through the various procedures in my head.  Made it mechanical.  Checked I had everything. Tried not to think.

5 Minutes.  I looked up from my watch.  A deep sigh.  Doubt held my stone stare into the middle distance.  It started slowly, before rising to a crescendo that consumed everything.  What if I was wrong?  What if this wasn’t for me?  Should I have chosen something else?  What even, if I fail?  No point even considering that though.  Just keep calm and carry on.

3 minutes.  I swore inwardly.  I’m not ready! What am I doing here?  Give me a week, then maybe.  But not now.  I’m destined for failure.  I looked up at the gangly group around me.  It was going to happen to some of us.  I know it’s selfish.  But I couldn’t help myself.  Stuck in the forefront of my mind, ‘anyone but me.  Anyone but me’. It was paralysing now.  I struggled to breathe, as i was incarcerated by it, the clock ticked, I felt sick –physically sick- the clock ticked, i don’t want to fail, this is it for me, it is over, the clock ticked again and again.  Would it ever stop? It was ticking away to my own oblivion.  It was like dying by 1000 cuts, killed by the methodical click of the second hand.  I hardly think i would have noticed the difference.  One minute to go....

But then what is it for?  This whole culture.  All that work, all that future, comes down to a couple of 2 hour stints in a dusty room.  But now wasn’t the time for that. I would save my rebellion for university, when the pressure was off.  As we all stood up in our roughly worn suits, the promises and reassurances and endless trivialisation of parents bearing little consequence, we all knew that this would define so much of our future.  I still couldn’t understand the point.  But then it isn’t about thinking, not really.  Not at exam time.