Twelve years have just boiled down to a brief stroll, a few cheap laughs, maybe a volleyball game, and a sigh more of pity and nostalgia than relief. The stroll came towards the end and I believe the cheap laughs came first. I’ll see if I can organize this into some sort of linear fashion.
Upon waking up for the last day of high school, I felt indifferent, groggy. I felt obligated to go, more out of curiosity than allegiance, and more for the future than for the present, which is a line blurred by years of regret. I let the wind generated by the golf cart whisk these thoughts away like El Nino, and concentrated of making up for my 12 years of regret in one day. I should have known the futility.
As school started, I seemed out of touch, out of reach. I was getting over pink eye, which didn’t help circumstances any, and I was too lost in thought to make any genuine conversation. This wasn’t an abnormality to my class mates; they’ve learned to expect the unexpected from me. I could show up in a dress and they would go right on pretending to learn things.
SIDE NOTE: That’s all we do in high school: pretend to learn things. Tax payers often wonder where their money on education really goes. It goes to teachers and administrators who teach kids how to pretend to learn things, how to pretend to be interested in things, how to pretend to enjoy things. We are raised on bullshit and we will continue to produce bullshit as long as the system stays the way it is currently.
BACK TO REALITY, whatever that is. As the day progressed, I found myself more in touch with this last-day realization. Maybe it was all the pictures I was forced to be in—Darin, get in this! Nevermind the fact that we’ve shunned and ignored you all year long. You’re a part of my high school experience and I want a picture. Click!—false reality.
Of course, there were the occasional pleasant people at the school; those who I can stand, who, without my knowledge of a deeper meaning as to why, are actually tolerable. As Revenge of the Nerds-esque as this might sound, I tended to be able to identify with my teachers more than with most of the students. Of course, by "most of the students" I mean those who cannot cohesively write a one page essay about some aspect of their life without overloading "really"s and "very"s in a string of boring, deplorable haste. Usually scrawled on a spiral notebook. A small, pink spiral notebook. Really really really really really pink.
And if my memory serves me correctly, volleyball was actually played on the second to last day of high school and, thus, has no place in here. So I will skip right over to the long stroll.
My school day ended halfway through the normal school day. Kids were still at lunch, hurling water balloons at one another, while the girls screamed a lot and took refuge in the bathrooms. I walked down the main hall, noticing my suroundings for the last time. I couldn’t leave like this. I walked around the campus once more. So anti-climactic. So alone. Then I walked back down the main hallway, watched the passersby all going the opposite direction, feeling like a salmon swimming upstream, away from this place, away from my childhood.
I walked off campus alone, looked back at the large, triangular school, breathed that final sigh and parted ways with those four years of experiment and wonder, of finding myself in a sea of identity, of clinging to the hope of innocence until it disintigrated in my hand, of losing beliefs and gaining others along the way, of all that I would look back on in contempt or nostalgia, knowing it would come to this final moment, and the days were gone from reality and etched into memory, a memory that will slowly fade with that same inevitable sigh. Goodbye high school years. Thanks for being there.