"Stand Before Your God"

[fiefoe]

The art of leaving, belonging, and retaining:

• But then there were the ranks without names that spread out through the school like veins through a person's body. They told us where we belonged in the school, and made us feel a part of it.
• I was no longer just the one who told stories and let them slip away like helium balloons into the sky, never returning. Now I set them on paper and kept them, stored like the specimens of luminous butterflies in the school museum.
• The places we had owned and called secret would now be secret for somebody else. We had grown too big in our bodies, even if our minds were not quite ready to leave.
• It seemed to me that, in the time between, the Dragon School had faded to a mass of shadows in my head. But when I got there, I realized it was not the Dragon that had become shadows to me. It was I who was now nothing more than a shadow to the school.
• Sam and Allen and Eric all disappeared to school, and generally we didn't say good-bye, as if it had taken us all by surprise.
• I had already begun to understand that what made Eton strong was not its age, but how little its age had changed it.
• There was nothing at Eton to remind me of home, and sometimes in class I would imagine that I'd made the whole thing up and all my transatlantic memories had no more substance than the rice-paper thinness of a dream.
  
• I knew other boys who felt the same, who had slashed their uniforms to shreds with knives and cackled like witches as the cloth turned to ribbons, but who then fell silent when they saw what they had done.
  
• As quietly as I could, I left... I kept wanting to turn around and take one last look at the place, but I didn't not allow myself to do it.