I still remember the weight of an empty backpack. Not the heavy kind, but the invisible kind—the one that presses down on your chest, making your stomach ache even before the first bell rings. Every morning, I carried it like a secret burden, knowing I would have to survive the day with almost nothing.
Our classroom was quiet, but not because the lessons were calm or the teacher’s voice soothing—it was quiet because half of us had no textbooks to follow along and no proper pages to anchor our thoughts. One book for ten students, and if you were unlucky, it wouldn’t reach your hands at all. You learned to whisper to your neighbor, to write down what you could remember and hope it was enough.
I improvised. I memorized. I copied from friends. I sketched diagrams in my notebook from memory, making do with what wasn’t mine to begin with. I learned how to pretend I understood things I didn’t. I learned to hide my confusion behind a quiet smile. And when exams came, I prayed that luck would be kinder than the system, that somehow all the gaps in my learning would not show on the paper, that my future would not be weighed down by a missing book.
Years later, I sit at my desk, the hum of computers and the quiet shuffle of papers around me a far cry from the stillness of classrooms past. My hands, once itching to hold a textbook that never came, now type reports, each keystroke a small proof that I survived. And yet, the memory of those empty pages lingers, like a shadow behind every achievement.
I know what could have been if learning had been a right, not a rationed privilege, if knowledge had been allowed to reach every student as it should. The ache of being left behind does not vanish with a paycheck—it waits patiently, reminding me that what was delayed cannot be fully undone.
Now, I hear that the backlog of textbooks has been cleared in six months. Six months to fix what took eleven years to neglect. Why did it take so long? When I was memorizing pages from friends’ books, when I was calculating my future with half the tools, when my own dreams were being weighed down by what should have been simple? Eleven years of students forced to survive education without what should have been basic. And yet it took only six months to prove it could have been done all along.
And now, all that loss of time and opportunity echoes quietly in the halls of progress that came too late. We survived, yes, but survival is not the same as learning, not the same as being given a fair chance. The system moved, but for so many of us, the years we could have learned cannot be recovered.
In that truth lies the lingering question: how many more could have been spared this ache if urgency had mattered from the very beginning?
