9PM Confessions

I'm really at that point in senior year where everything exhausts me. 

Every time I do something, I'm acutely aware that it's the last time I am doing it, while also wondering why the heck I'm doing it again in the first place. Eating lunch in this disgusting cafeteria? I'll kill for a lunch with my closest friends on May 28th, but for now, I'd die for one anywhere else. 

These past few weeks (seven-day-snow-day-induced-vacation aside), I've been spending an inordinate amount of time at Troy High. Between driving school, clubs, and actual school, I feel like I've seen this school in all of its lights recently: in the morning, when people are crawling in, barely awake; right after 2:10pm, when the hallways feel less bloated and yet energized; late at night, when the doors are locked and the flourescent lighting feels ethereal. 

My best friend and I have a "9pm Rule" -- everything we say after 9pm is automatically confidential, because something about the darkness makes us more honest. My closeted romantic comes out to play, even if I'm sitting in the social studies hallway surrounded by sophomores who know a suspicious amount of information about vape companies. 

Today I walked around and peered into my AP World History classroom, searching for the poster with all of the alliances we had made amongst ourselves for a stupid pretend-war game we were playing. We ended up declaring nuclear war and destroying our entire planet, but our teacher still hasn't taken down the visual representation of our powers. I wonder if he recounts stories from our class at his dinner table every night the way I do. 

I walked downstairs, and saw the room where the newspaper kids congregate to write scathing exposes on the THS Line. They were pitching ideas over each other, every one of them leaning their entire bodies on another. I began to estimate how many bacterial infections they're passing to each other right now, then decided against it. 

I walked through the connecting hallway, where the snow was piling up outside in a way even I can't romanticize -- it was disgusting. I thought about how I'd have to trudge home through the snow tomorrow, preemptively regretting the choice I hadn't yet made to wear sneakers. 

I'm not stupid; I know that high school is genuinely gross. A cesspool of all the worst people, during all their worst times. Everyone I know has been clinically depressed and severely anxious for the majority of it. Beyond that, high school is a rat race, everyone solving algebraic equations and conjugating verbs to get into college, as though either of those things are transferrable skills anywhere. There are jerks and cheaters, pathological liars and just terrible people in every corner. Heck, I've been the jerk and liar and terrible person in someone else's corner -- more than once. It's exhausting to wake up before the sun everyday, stressed and chronically sleep-deprived (Well, not me. I sleep at 10:00pm.), then pretending to pay attention to teachers who certainly don't get paid enough to care. 

We're indignant teenagers. We spend most of high school deeply personally offended at something that has wronged us in ways previously unknown to mankind. I'm pretty sure I taught my friends what the word "rant" means, slamming my fist into the lunchroom table so frequently my legacy is probably a dent in the wood. 

And yet, despite it all, this is where I was made. 

This is where I was carved and molded, chiseled out of stone and given a tin heart. This is where I was given unconditional permission to invent, and reinvent, and reinvent. Here, every day was a rebirth. And every night came with forgiveness. 

Can I tell you a secret? No matter where I go, or who I befriend and become, or whether I visit in ten years and find all my favorite teachers waiting up for me, this will always be true. This ship-shaped building could be broken down, brick by brick, forest growing in its place, and it wouldn't matter.

I will always call this place home.