So, tomorrow will be exactly thirty years since the Last Bell* rang for me in my school in Zaporizhzhia: I was a 16 yo teen, shy, secluded, self-centered, egoistic, awfully naïve, bitterly cynical (or so I thought, lol) and a bit pretentious (aren’t we all at that age?).

The path I chose for my future self looked quite unambiguous: Uni, then Academia, yet the rest (the actual academic part) felt pretty obscure. I loved reading and thought that the mere fact of it would eventually make everything clear: philology, I was speculating in my head, will open all the doors for “true knowledge”—I’m feeling a bit sorry for my boisterous entitlement now. Boy oh boy, what a journey that turned out to be!..

But at the time, in dazzling May 1992, I was ready for changes—and was waiting anxiously for my maths and English exams. In two weeks I passed them all, and the tutor of our class would alert me with a tragic whisper: Lena, she gasped dramatically, do you know that you won’t get a gold medal?! “Have no idea,” said I, shrugging awkwardly (it mattered only for my entering points for the University). She continued after a long theatrical pause: “It will be silver, Lena, silver! Because you have one “four” for physics in the third semester of the ninth grade! The rest of them “fives,” of course, but still!” I shrugged again: fine then, silver isn’t that bad, after all.

And it wasn’t: in two months I was rolled in to my Zaporizhzhian alma mater and for the next five years lived a happy life as a student, but that is a whole other story.

Tempus fugit, my fellow people. Tempus fugit indeed.

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*For my Western peers: that was—and still is—an old school (pun intended) Soviet/post-Soviet tradition of the farewell ceremony for the pupils leaving on May 25, which stands for the end of the final spring semester and the beginning of the summer holidays; for those who are finishing secondary school (in the UK), or high school (in the US), it means the start of the final school exams (equal to GCSE here), which continue till the middle of June