Have you ever noticed that there are a few moments in your life when your vision of the future contracts to just one tiny point in time, beyond which the future is blank? Such a moment is the arrival of the Leaving Certificate results, which in my case resulted in a case of severe tunnel vision with regard to the future. In fact I couldn't even plan the night out after the results, I was so paralysed with uncertainty.
As the day approached I noticed something else: when you get them depends entirely on you. You decide when to go and collect them.
This amounts to almost obscene mental torture. It is like being sent to the guillotine and being asked to say when you'd like the blade to fall.
Needless to say I was practically apoplectic when the day itself dawned. I sat up in bed and wondered how long I could postpone the inevitable, if I barricaded the door and subsisted on a diet of shoe leather and moisture licked from the window. (Hey, that's better than getting the results.)
When I found myself in the bathroom eyeing the toothpaste and shampoo (comparing their nutritional value), I decided I had waited long enough and staggered off towards the school. Getting the results themselves was something of an anticlimax. To be honest, all I can remember is a piece of yellow paper held in my trembling hands and a passing teacher helpfully adding up my points for me.
The subsequent look of utter disbelief on my face was swiftly followed by one of insane glee as I meandered off towards the pub, with the vague intention of getting completely smashed. As it happened, I stayed totally sober that night but still all I can remember is a confused vortex of blissfully intoxicated faces.
That was it really. I spent the next two days painting my room (and getting completely out of my skull on paint fumes - accidently). As I said, it was something of an anticlimax.
Others have reported feelings of pure terror on the morning of the offers. You know, sweaty palms, a pounding headache, an uncomfortable writhing in the lower intestinal tract. I may as well confess that I was so sure I had got what I wanted that I went hiking instead, oblivious to the fact that my future was coming through the post. Actually, they were pretty much as I expected, so there was nothing dramatic about the moment.
The drama is undoubtedly yet to come. It is slowly sinking in that in a few short weeks I'll be leaving home forever to strike out on my own (and returning every few weeks to get my laundry done). It's not that I don't like the town I live in - I do - but it's like an old piece of chewing gum. I've been chewing it for too many years now and it's become dull, tasteless and stringy. I'm looking for a new piece of gum . . . actually, no, I'm looking for an entirely new flavour (spearmint, possibly?) and I think that college can provide that. (Obviously, I don't mean literally - as far as I'm aware, free chewing gum is not a part of an Irish university education). Well, I suppose I'll find out in October.
Stephen Hurley From Bedford, Listowel, Co Kerry, Stephen got 560 points in his Leaving Cert and is going to study computer science at UL.
