Our heads could do with filling, with some interesting stuff

The School In August

By Philip Larkin 

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

My house woke up early today. I made lunches while eating breakfast.
It is the first day of school today for Rosie and PJ, the first day of their junior and senior years.

This poem came to my mind yesterday and will not leave me alone today. I can't complain too much, Philip Larkin is most often wonderfully biting. But I must be getting old if this is on my mind. I'm just thinking about how I miss having an exciting and scary first day of school. I miss caring so much, taking the entire week before to plan my outfit.

I miss that bucket of emptiness in my stomach that grew even bigger right before going into each classroom because I didn't know who was in the class with me. I miss it becoming filled with some form of helium if I saw my best friends or a cute boy, or filled with mushy mashed potatoes if there was no one I knew or just that one guy who didn't wash his hair.

I'm nostalgic for newness and exciting change.
But Emy, aren't you still in school? Aren't you going to start a new semester soon? Don't you get to go to new classes every semester and even a new ward every year?
Yes yes and yes.
BUT,
Going to class is not new anymore, going to the singles ward is not new anymore. In other words, I no longer have an empty stomach on the first day of class. It's filled with comfortable fluff. In the last few years the fluff has been slowly filtering in. I mistook it for bravery, courage, even maturity and welcomed it on in. I am braver, I have more courage, I am more mature. But the fluff is different. I now see it for what it really is: complacency. I don't think it has necessarily been all bad for me; I do have to get all my credits and get my degree and that takes some time.
 But the fluff is old.
Grey.

I don't want to get stuck in nostalgia, as too many do when they are at the end of a portion of their life. I cannot forget to allow the good kind of empty space back in.
 I want a chance to be filled with new things again. The exciting helium, the disappointing mashed potatoes, maybe even unpredictable waves, folds of silk, or blue and green pebbles.