29: Done.

In the overpaid parking lot outside my final exam, I stand frozen, neither student nor graduate, a body suspended between states. The April air carries Calgary chill—spring in theory, but winter in practice. Four years of words and pirated textbooks, readings and writings, distilled into a three-hour block of frantic scribbling, and then: nothing.

I held my pencil too tight, knuckles pallid against its surface, as I scratched out answers on my final English exam. The second-floor hallway in the Faculty of Arts building smelled of dead air and abandoned coffee cups. I submitted my paper exactly three years, seven months, and eighteen days after starting this degree, at age twenty-four—after dropping out of high school, after cooking at a children’s hospice for years, after failed attempts at computer science and information technology. After everything.

No fanfare. Just the anticlimactic click of a classroom door closing behind me for the last time. I walked down the cement stairwell alone. No confetti. No ceremonial marker between student and graduate. Just the quiet rhythm of my footsteps echoing against bare walls.

Ten days earlier, I’d rented an Airbnb near Chinook Mall for what was meant to be both birthday celebration and farewell party. I’d cleaned meticulously, arranged furniture to maximize conversation pockets, my mom stayed up all night the day before preparing so much food. I’d imagined laughter echoing off walls, tearful goodbyes, promises to visit Winnipeg. I’d imagined connection. Instead, I watched the clock as the scheduled start time came and went. Messages pinged: *Running late*. *Something came up*. *Not feeling well*.

I’m so grateful to those who did arrive. The absence of bodies made their presence more conspicuous. We drank and talked, but the conversation felt performative, everyone careful to avoid mentioning how many weren’t there. How many didn’t come to say goodbye. Is this how things end—not with ceremony but with unanswered text messages?

After nearly four years of essays about identity, place, and belonging, where am I? My degree is present in memory but absent in substance. My transcripts show a 3.8 GPA, but numbers say nothing about the nights spent wrestling with impostor syndrome, about feeling both too white to claim my Métis heritage fully and too Indigenous to fit seamlessly into academic spaces. The murky waters of identity never clarify, no matter how many theoretical frameworks you apply.

Outside, Calgary’s air carried the mineral scent of melting snow from the Rockies. *Mohkínstsis*. I sat on a bench near the library where Write Club first gathered with a handful of members, now grown to over one-hundred, and tried to feel something appropriate for the occasion. Triumph, perhaps. Validation. Instead, I f