Imagine you had a timer with 1,388 days on it, what will you do with those days? Will you focus on studying and getting into your top choice? Will you be with your friends all the time focusing on the next big party? Or will you focus on everything but school and let the time pass you by? Our timer starts the minute we walk through the doors of high school for the first time and it’s a countdown that only stops with a cap and gown.
The year is 2017, we just graduated 8th grade and we made it! We’re finally in high school. Soon we’ll have parties, driving lessons, reckless nights, relationships, some freedom, football games, and times you will always remember with the people you’ll never forget; or so we thought. We walk into class on the first day of school as bright eyed freshmen; the teacher asks each student the golden question “Tell me about yourself?” We go around the room playing the name game, everyone being a little nervous; then we start our first lesson. Who knew four years later we’d be playing the same game as we get ready to walk across the stage.
As the days go by our freshman year, the “honeymoon phase” starts to fade. We start seeing it as class after class, teacher after teacher, living every day just waiting for the bell to ring so we can go home. We all have senioritis since freshman year but at least that’s something we all have in common. As each year passes us by we can’t wait til the next boring year is over. We finally get to have as much fun as the seniors have had each year. Finally we are juniors, our last boring year; then came a day all of us will remember…March 13th, 2020. That day we were told we would have an extra week of spring break. We would return back to school in two weeks.
Here we are a year and two months later writing this story during an asynchronous class.
Senior year of high school is full of “Goodbye” and “I’ll miss you”. Athletes play their hardest on the field/court they’ve grown to love over the past four years, actors take their final bows and all of the little goodbyes slowly add up. Some people probably think high school met and exceeded their expectations. Others would agree it is NOTHING like we thought it would be.
Our whole lives everyone has told us that these 1,388 days will be the best days of our lives, but we spent them waiting for a year that never came. So as we begin to say goodbye to one another and our timer comes to an end, All I want to say to the lowerclassmen is slow down, don’t wait for the days to pass you by like we did. The past year has proven anything can happen in the blink of an eye. Things that we will never get back. So enjoy high school. Enjoy every second of that countdown because we didn’t and here we are. Don’t take one corny moment for granted. Cherish them all. And to my fellow seniors, thank you for all the memories we didn’t know we were making. So that’s it. The end of our high school career. It really was nothing like a high school musical.