Seniors

Everything was different when I was in high school. It wasn't hell on earth, neither was it the prime of my life. If anything, it was a void. I passed through like any extra on a TV show, except, my time in high school wouldn't have even been worth getting on the screen. Other people have stories. I have small snippets. Flashes. It was different, like I said. I was indifferent.

     What happened on the first day of high school? You'd think I would remember something like that. I remember the first day of high school for Hannah Montana and her best friend, Lily, on the show I used to watch every now and then (and secretly, all the time). Miley had eyes only for the whole place, the new environment, and of course, the boys. Everyone was bigger, they said, which I guess was true for me too.

     Seniors look like adults. Everything is crowded and gray-blue, not white and spacious like on TV. The lockers were small. In middle school, we would take tours of the high school, field trips to a place ten minutes away, walking distance. Us eight-graders would compare the length of the freshman lockers to the width of our hands and note, with excitement and despair, that they were not so different.

     The place was big, then. I couldn't find anything, not when I went with my family during the open house, at least. My mom kept expecting me, somehow, to know where I was going just because I'd be going there, as if I could imbibe all the knowledge taught (and not taught) in the place, just by being there.

     Once school actually starts, it's all easy. You go to class, you learn, just as you had always done, ever since you can remember. People might say high school was hard, but it wasn't for me. I might have lamented the move our family made from a two-story home, complete with deck, to a small, dingy apartment that had your average, smoking, screaming, and fire-setting neighbors. It was difficult, I guess, having to face my family in such close-quarters, to not have a functioning lock on my door.

     But that was the brunt of it. I had people to sit with at lunch, and even when I didn't, I knew how to handle it. I made a friend or two in P.E. – my brief brush with the anime otaku crowd, even though I didn't realize it at the time. I had my best friend from middle school. I only had one or two classes with her and a lunch, but it was something. I got by.

     I did orchestra. It was never one of those things I thought was important, really. To me, it was just a class I had always taken, ever since fourth grade. Looking back on it, though, I guess it shaped my experience greatly, as much as my experience could have been shaped. I met my best friend for six years (the last year or so might have been questionable) there. I only hung out with friends of friends from orchestra. Most of the activities I did outside of academia and home were concerts or orchestra field trips or activities fairs. Not that it ever defined me, or I thought it didn't. I wonder who I was then, to think that this major aspect of my life really had little to do with me.

     I remember the locker room. It was never creepy, like in horror movies, or incredibly awkward, both of which I feared. The first time I undressed in front of ten other girls, it felt completely normal. What I hated was the smell. The compacted stench of thirty different girls' perfumes and the undercurrent of BO, it was wretched and made me sneeze. I had to borrow a uniform all the time, because I was forgetful, even then.

     I remember some girls talking about how they shaved their legs in that class, which seemed so ridiculously intimate to me then. One of them said how it was difficult to get around the ankles, which I didn't get, and around the knees, which I didn't get either. My BFF also talked about that once, when we were sitting in the hallway, eating lunch. She confided in me that she got hair on her knees, and she acted like it was so weird that when she asked me if I was the same, I said no.

     One time, we were in P.E, and the gay guy that everyone seemed to like and know, and one of the only people I could talk to in gym class, wasn't there. We were supposed to be walking around the track. I was by myself, trying to see if I could walk straight while closing my eyes. It couldn't have been, but I remember the skies being gray that time, that it was raining. A teacher eventually came over to ask if I was okay.

     They tended to do that.

     There are other things I could say about high school. When I tried joining the art club in my senior year, because I didn't have a lot of extracurriculars. When I went to Korea. When I joined a national history competition with an exhaustive project on Dorothea Dix, whom you've probably never heard of. When I played with my orchestra in the White House and thought that the time I spent there, during Christmastime with my eventual crush, would be the closest I would ever get to a date.

     I could tell you about all the hours I spent for the National Honor Society, the Science Honor Society, the French Honor Society, the Math Honor Society, the English Honor Society, and the History Honor Society, which actually changed its name to something I never bothered to remember. It's funny. When I list it out like that, it's like I actually did something in high school. Honestly, it always felt like one big joke. Some kind of hoax, telling all of us that this was everything you needed to prepare you for the life 'out there'.

     It was insignificant to me then, and it's even more now.

     There was this air vent in this one hallway on the second floor ceiling of the school. It always blew hot air, a godsend during the winter.

     One day, it snowed. We didn't have to go to school, and that's why I went. The school was empty, filled only with snow, up to the very tops of these tables people would sit at for lunch, on nice days. People had drawn a gigantic dick into the football field, and I laughed when I saw it, from the bleachers. I took a picture.

     I made snowmen there, in the field, singing a little as I played by myself. Walking around, I felt what I thought would be bravery, but what turned out to be fear.

     I ran in the track that surrounded the field, once or twice, by myself and with my mom. I closed my eyes once as I ran, because it was the morning and I had done it before. I ran bodily into a trash can, staining my favorite jacket with coffee, a scent newer to me then, than it is now.

     There was this red-haired boy who used to be in one of my science classes, and incidentally, in debate when I joined. He was pear-shaped and jovial, in his looks, anyway. He always drank iced coffee in the mornings, and it made his breath smell horrible. By that point, I had built a prejudice against coffee.

     It always seemed to be the popular, more adult-like kids that drank coffee. Walking in with them in the mornings, like the actual adults, as if they didn't receive allowances from their parents and never got grounded. Not that either of those things ever happened to me.

     There was this girl, once. She kissed her boyfriend in the hall, and I thought she looked so adultish then. It wasn't a make-out, slobbery, teenage kind of kiss, it was a woman and a man's smack on the lips, just a greeting between two lovers.

     They seemed so far away.

     I went to the same high school as my crush from elementary school. If I had ever loved a man, I guess I loved him. At the very least, he shaped me, which is wild because we barely knew each other. His older sister was my sister's best friend, and that's how I fell for him. Through second-hand stories. Love is really something so unpredictable, alive. Twenty-one years and I've loved many people, but I've never fallen in love. To trust someone so completely, even if the opportunity presented itself – which, in its barest form, I guess it has – is just not possible for me. Well, it's possible. Anything is possible. It would just be difficult.

     And to be honest, I hate writing romance. Yet, I can never stay away. My romance stories, to me, seem volatile, or flat, or too disturbing, just never right. They're too emotional. I can't look at them from the outside in and find what I'd done wrong. But that's what fiction is for, isn't it? What writing is for. To lie to yourself, to everyone about who you are or who you want to be. Only by sifting through all those lies, can you really see the truth.

     And the truth is, I want to fall in love. I want Prince Charming or tall, dark, and handsome, or Mr. Hipster to walk right into my life someday and tell me what I want to hear. I'm sure this isn't too revolutionary of an idea. But I feel like that everyday, I think of it every time I wake up in the morning. There's an emptiness, just waiting to be filled, but by what? Shame. Regret. Jealousy. Bitterness. If love ever does come for me, I hope this emotional well won't be too filled up by then.

     And a lot of the times, I weirdly wish that I was gay. I know I've been influenced not only by what I read, but by my company. But I don't know. I've tried, emotionally. And I'm tired of trying. But what happens when I stop trying? Do I move forward, or backwards? Left, or right? Into love or out of it. I wish I knew. I wish I didn't have a headache, maybe I could think clearly about this then. Maybe I could stop being so tired, then.

     I want to touch. More than anything, I want to touch. Hair, neck, legs, the space between. I want to know. If I'll be touched back.

     But that's the extent of it. Does that count? It's not like in the books. I don't feel electricity, a spark. I feel longing. As if there's nothing else that can relieve all of this uncertainty that I feel everywhere, all the time. Like one touch can siphon it all away. Or more than one touch, many. A hug that lasts forever.

     Maybe I stare. When I can get away with it. But when we're together, it's not like the planets align and I feel peace on earth or reach the zenith of happiness. I feel awkward. I take the first opportunity to leave. But the instant I do, I wish I hadn't.

     Why am I like this? Life sucks, sometimes. When I want her here with me.

     And then we reach further complications. Because I'm leaving, we're separating, just months from now. Graduation. What's more, college graduation. My entire life, and this is no exaggeration, has been funneling down to this point. The first person in my family to graduate college. Me. Just little old me.

     So, what am I supposed to do now? Now, I push through to the end. To the finish line. But after? I start living life for me, I suppose. I start doing what I want to do.

     But then, what have I been doing for all this time?

     I want to love, that's true. I want to love my job. My life, myself. Someone else. That's a big goal, though. Much bigger than finishing college.

     I know who I am, or I guess, what I am. The balance between hating myself and liking myself has very much resolved itself, by this point. I want to look outward now. I want to see how other people work, how life works. I want to see people's faces when my words reach their ears or hearts, or just simply, their minds. I want the world. No, I want a world with me in it. Is that so much to ask?

     I guess I'll find out.