Take to the sky

God, I'm such a narcissist. 

"I shot for the sky."  –Down, Jason Walker

I did too. I reached for the stars and I swung for the heavens. And now my head’s rested on the cotton-candy of cloud, its milky-pink wisps a delicate tendril around my wrists. It is an ethereal bliss, this.

But I took a while to get here.

It's funny how you would never know the faith and confident you have in yourself till the breathless moment of truth when the results are smeared grossly all over your college inbox like a spilt bottle of black ink. Especially ones you strove hard for, songs you used your heart to polish so that fears of exam don’t taint enough to dull the brilliance.

I’m not saying the others were slacking, but I know I slaved for the 4 Jury pieces, just so I could put my mind at ease during the pending weeks of the doomsday. God knew the relaxed state I was in the last 7 days before The Day. It was as if my brains were a fenced off meadow where the sheep of Jury 2, Results and Days Left rather graze grass than try jumping over the barrier.

And that brief moment when I stepped out of the jam room, I was brimming with self-assurance that I did well, beyond a doubt. But today when Simon asked, “Why didn’t you want to check your results? What exactly are you expecting to get? B? C?”

In that 2-second silence, I was actually considering a D.

Guess it was written all over my face.

“You passed, I saw your results.”

Sad to say, I was immensely relief I simply passed and not bothering to consider if I got a higher grade.

“Hey, what are the marks you’d need to get for an A?”

“Erm…80 plus, I guess.”

“Ahhh. Juan said you got an A.”

“WHAT?!”

“I asked Juan about your results. He said you got an A.”

(I don’t understand why people can’t tell from my tone that my WHAT meant ‘YOU’RE SERIOUS?!’, not ‘come again?’. Not that I’m annoyed. I’m just baffled at my inadequacy to convey my surprise.)

But I didn’t want to believe it. My heart is a fragile thing. No need to carry up to the 15^th floor only to drop it back down. Not because I didn’t trust either of them, it was simply because I honestly thought it was law-of-nature-defying impossible. I had no belief in myself. If I were Tinkerbell, I would have died long ago.

Which was how, 7 murderous hours later, I found my eyes screening the page deliberately slowly, my inner eye preparing my heart for a B+, at most.    

Major Instrument Piano 4          A+          89

HOLY MOTHER OF HEAVENS. GOOD LORD OF DIVINITY. MY SWEET GOD.

I had wind knocked out of me forcefully. 

I mean, ME?! It was like some fairy godperson just handed me a sword and incited, “You are the Chosen One. Only you, who could defeat the evil and bring peace to this world.”

I swear, it felt like that. Surreal. Infinitely impossible. Mistaken.

Wen Dee has some wicked skills. Jia Wen chose mind-blowing band songs. Rou Yen possesses crazy chops. But me? This is insane.

Emotionally electrifying and all-consuming ecstatic, but nonetheless other-worldly absurd; truly it is.

The fact is still too fat for my mind to wrap around. Half of me swimming in this lake of happiness; the other half trying to formulate a logical equation leading to the marks.  

Please slap me if I start to get big-headed in college.