You're The One Living In The Moment, I Thought Everthing Was Sure, You're The One Telling Me It's Hopeless, Don't Know What I'm Sorry For

--"You're The One", Damone

eight zero

after the lights fade
and the chairs have been folded,
will you know the show's done?
~dw

----

There was an incident last year when I was changing for P.E. class. I had yet again misplaced my requisite school-approved shirt and had to make due with a shirt from home. The only shirt I could scrounge up was a graduation shirt from Farnsley the previous year. You know the one. I think every school does them. It has all of the graduating class in the year they graduated--in my case, '05. I know why I kept it, but on reflection I shouldn't have worn it that day. ¶The first comment out of Angie's mouth was that it was tacky to wear your eight grade graduation shirt to high school. I, of course, asked why. You're in a new school, she said. You should forget about your old one. I still wasn't understanding her. I had liked Farnsley. I had liked my friends there. And while a few of them had moved over to where I'm going now, not enough had. I guess on that day, out of the dozens of t-shirts I own I had decided to wear that one because I was feeling nostalgic. ¶Here's the thing. Upon further review, I don't think it was mere nostalgia for me. High school is hard. Harder than it should be for me. And when something's perceived as being difficult, the natural reaction is for a person to retreat back to something easier or more manageable. Yes, it was just a shirt. But in a way I was asserting that I could still be that girl who had managed to slosh her way through middle school. It was my blue and gold badge of courage when placed into the den of horrors that I imagined high school to be. ¶It's hard to close out one chapter of your life for another. It's especially stressful for me because I'm not a person that lets go of things easily. Especially memories of happier days. ¶People are always wanting me to grow up, to grow past the safety of my own world. I don't know if they realize how too much of my time is spent worrying about the future and my place in it. If they knew how often I go to sleep worried about what's to become of me in a year's time, they would see I'm not a person who lives in the past. I'm just a person who recognizes where she came from and is grateful for the time she's had so far. ¶I don't want to revisit my past. But I'm not going to be ashamed of it either. I was proud to go to that school. I was proud to be that person. That chapter of my biography has been earmarked one of my favorites.

dw