Friday night football. Tennis season. Gym class. German. Secrets. Locker rooms. Teachers lounge. Announcements lady. Awards banquets. Prom. Clubs. Math class. Secrets. Teachers that never taught. National Honors Society. Musicals. Report cards. Agendas. Note passing. Dressing up. Dressing down. Secrets. Dances. 6AM. Pep rallies. May Day. Bonfires. AP classes. More secrets.
I don't miss high school. Not even a little bit. I don't miss the classes, or those teachers who sat at their desks talking on cell phones when we couldn't. I don't miss the sports, or the clubs, or the long, drawn out hours. I don't miss playing tennis on a team that I could care less about. I don't miss the complicated way of asking people out, or most of my classmates who truly believed that we didn't have a clique problem. Yeah. Okay. I don't miss pretending to understand why friends were mad at you one minute and hugging you the next. I hated that the most.
And yet. Every time I'm home, I open my bedroom blinds and stare at the high school that consumed 5 years of my life. I watch kids walk around the track in their gym shorts and over-sized T-Shirts, and imagine they are talking about weekend plans, or how pointless gym class was, anyway. That's what my friends and I talked about when we were in their place. I'll sit on the porch and hears announcements being made, or bells blaring to signify the end of one class and the beginning of another. I remember walking through those halls, waiting for my friends at lunch, sitting quietly in classes, sneaking out of 9th period every chance I got so I could grab my backpack and book it out of there as quickly as humanly possible. There were plenty of aspects I enjoyed, sure, but once you've tasted college, who wants to go back?
I can't help but wonder if they know, though...those kids walking the track during gym class. I truly wonder if they know that one day, they probably won't be friends with most of the people they pass notes with now. I distinctly remember a gym class conversation I was having with a friend days before our senior graduation. I remember being so excited, so ready to move on with my life, to bust out of the mold high school smothered me in. Not a cloud was in the sky, and the weather couldn't have been more perfect. We were talking about keeping in touch, and how that wouldn't be a problem for us, because really, why would it? We were incredibly close, and had been for years.
No one ever mentions that the biggest difference between college and high school is not necessarily distance, and not really the fact that you're way busier than you ever were before. No, the biggest difference is that you forget. You grow up. You realize that gym class conversations were never really anything but gym class conversations, and that before high school graduation, you didn't know a thing about anything. Life happens. Conversations now are not completely different than those that escaped in high school halls, but they are not typically with the same people. These conversations are with people who never took gym class with you in high school, and had to learn how to spell your first and last name correctly. Not that one is better than the other...they are simply different.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go back to being a high school senior with the knowledge and two years of college under my belt. I wonder if I wouldn't care as much, or if I would be more vocal and just tell people how I feel instead letting emotions and arguments fester. I wonder if I would be more intelligent, if I would have gotten a higher score on the AP English exam, or if nothing would have bothered me like it used to.
I wonder, and then I sigh. I'm glad I don't know. Some pieces of life are meant to be immature, and stupid, and careless. It makes it neat to look back and realize that high school was how it should have been, and as much as I don't miss it, it needed to happen exactly how it did in order to make me into the person I am now.
"When you leave here, don't forget why you came." Adlai Stevenson
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