Missing the old school…

November comes with pale blue skies, with a breeze just enough to make people close their shirt flaps, with a morning when they wake up to a mist that is thinner than usual and their hearts suddenly soften in an indescribable way. Perhaps that is why, after many years, every time November returns, I always feel like I am entering an old memory area, where there are loves that once existed clearly and now, just remembering them, everything becomes clear, peaceful and strangely whole.

Illustration: Internet

I remember my old school, the old images come back to life. The leaves of the banyan trees in the school yard have begun to change, yellow leaves fall all over the yard, each time the wind blows, the leaves gently rotate and touch the ground like a slow greeting. The school yard in the early morning still has the remaining cold of the night, dew condenses on the bars of the classroom doors, on the old wooden tables, on each chair there is an engraving of someone's name that once held a painful memory of youth. I went through those years in a very natural way, carefree, not knowing what to keep, only to later understand that perhaps the most beautiful years of a person's life are the years when we do not yet understand that we are living in youth.

My teachers are still present as if they had never left that hallway. I still remember the sound of his footsteps passing the classroom every morning, his simple shirt, his gentle but always serious eyes when starting class. I remember her voice reading literature steadily like a quiet stream, yet each word seeped into me without me even realizing it. I never understood why there were many things that we thought were unimportant when we were in class, and could even forget right after class, but at a certain age, the simple words of our teachers became the way I faced life. The poem I hastily copied during literature class that year, the passage she lectured about kindness, or the teacher's advice before the exam that "as long as you give your all, the result will be worth it" were not lessons in books, but things that supported me in the bumpy years of growing up later.

November still holds something else in my heart, as gentle and fragile as a breeze: that is first love. A passing glance during recess. A time standing next to each other under the eaves sheltering from the rain and both silent. A feeling of confusion to the point of not knowing where to put your hands when passing that person. There was nothing called a confession. No one dared to say big things. Just a few very normal questions, a few lines exchanged on a folded piece of paper, or just a wish for good luck on an exam on an early winter morning. Yet people remember it for a lifetime.

Then time continued to pass, until the time came for us to leave school and fly away to many places. On the final graduation day of the final year, no one said much, but in everyone's heart, something was quietly changing. The hallway was still the same, the blackboard was still the same, the school drum still rang three times like every day, but the only difference was that this time we heard the drum as a farewell...

Many years later, when November returned, I suddenly wanted to walk back down the old path. The school had changed its paint color, the yard had been repaved, the trees from years ago had grown or had been replaced, but just standing in front of the school gate, I immediately felt like I was being brought back. We no longer ran, no longer called each other's names, no longer carried heavy bags on our shoulders, but deep in my heart I clearly heard my seventeen-year-old self laughing. I knew that the most beautiful things were not what I saw before my eyes, but what had happened inside me.

And then, on a very slow November afternoon, I suddenly smiled. Not because everything was intact, but because they had existed so beautifully. I realized that I didn’t need to go back to stay. Just remembering and living on kindly was a way to show gratitude.

Source: https://baodaklak.vn/van-hoa-du-lich-van-hoc-nghe-thuat/van-hoc-nghe-thuat/202511/nho-mai-truong-xua-0001735/