Perhaps thirteen years won’t compare to the rest of my life, but for now, it makes up more than half of my existence. In the trajectory of those thirteen years I have garnered experiences and memories that will be what I look back on as my youth. Thirteen years is not a short amount of time. In those thirteen years: I learned how to write, I learned how to tie my shoe laces, I learned how to make new friends, and I learned how to make a path of my own in school. As I approach my final year, I also become more hopeful of finishing school soon, or at least the routine daily school system that I have been a part of for so many years.
I would sometimes wake up and wish for it to be night again so that I could go back to sleep. I would have bad days at school, and I would wish for the day to be over already. I can only truly remember fifth grade through eighth grade being substantially more enjoyable than the previous years. Despite COVID-19 taking away my middle school promotion and the remainder of my last semester in middle school, I would say it was the best time of my school life. COVID-19 took away my freshman year of high school, which I didn’t really mind at the time. However, now I realize that maybe I do. It isn’t that I really care for missing out on my first year of high school, but I am disappointed because the pandemic inevitably changed me. Positive and negative things came out of it, but the negative effects were seen sooner and they prevailed. My social skills decreased, I had a shorter attention span, and I wasn’t feeling as great as I had in eighth grade. These things affected me throughout sophomore year and even partially in junior year. In my junior year the panorama improved, but I still had to work on myself to reach the point where I had left off in middle school. Often, I found myself thinking of the future and about the passing days I was spending performing the same school routine wondering: When will it end?!
This year, in the first week of school, I visited my elementary school. I was overcome with emotion when being welcomed by the smell that made me feel anxious as well as safe when I was a child. It wasn’t until I stepped through those elementary school doors and was welcomed by that familiar smell that I realized I miss it, for not only did it remind me of the good things, but of the little fears that inevitably were also a part of my time there.
I saw many new faces and some faces I still recognized as they had once been the faces that greeted me. Among the faces I recognized was the face of my kindergarten teacher who I had known prior to entering grade school. I became sentimental thinking about all of the years I’ve known her, and the warmth she greets me with whenever we meet. I instantly became nostalgic and thought of the children who attend the same elementary school. They will grow with the inevitable impact that their teachers have on them as people.
In the time I’ve been attending school, many days I wished to not come to school, but it was those same days that I found were filled with unexpected good things when I looked back on it at the end of the day. Most of those things were trivial, but would not have been had I gone to school.
This year my perspective is different. Maybe it’s because I have evolved, or maybe it’s because of the circumstance, being in my last year I wish for it to be memorable. I’ll have good and bad days, but I’ll get through them, and in the future I want to look back on my senior year and remember it as a good one.
In my junior year of high school, as we read The Great Gatsby my teacher asked: Are you a dreamer? He wanted us to determine whether or not we were similar to Gatsby, who wanted to relive things that had already happened. At first, I thought I wasn’t, but analyzing that now, maybe we’re not so different. It’s not necessarily that I want to relive things that have already occurred, but more so that I want the feel of things to be as they once were. Like the way everything seemed bright and fun from fifth to eighth grade. I realize however, that things can’t stay the same, if they did, perhaps there would be no change in myself either. So I will try not to live by keeping things the same, or change them completely either. Instead, I will change my outlook to a more positive one in order preserve the things I wish to carry with me even after high school. For my final year I wish to refrain from asking “when will it end?!” and instead take everything one moment at a time.
