I am writing to you from the end of my sophomore year at Poteau High School.
I was told that I should consider writing a retrospective piece, but despite what some people may think, I do not, in fact, know everything.
So instead, I’ve chosen to present to you three facts.
- We are all on this big, hunking rock that is floating through this infinite void (unless you’re a conspiracy theorist and believe in a flat Earth.)
- In our finite forms, we may never truly grasp or experience the universe’s infinity.
- Despite the endless possibilities surrounding our universe and the many other alternate realities, we have somehow ended up together.
Now what does that mean?
Well, to put it simply, we are all, at some point, pondering why our cafeteria sucks so much—kidding.
No, we are all on this path that leads to one thing: our future.
Whatever this future may be, we are on our way to meet it. And together, in high school, we are preparing to face it. We already are, in some senses.
We are together. Now and perhaps never again, given that at some point, your world rounds to a fine point of people you know and people you once knew.
But for now, we are together. And to think of it so seriously hurts.
I do know one thing: we won’t be alive forever. That is hard to truly grasp when you are so young and caught up in the world around you. But it is the truth. And while that sucks, and while we are on a constant journey to meet our future, we must realize that maybe our perception of reality is flawed. The future is now. We must wake up to greet the sun, no matter how harshly it burns our skin.
And together we will do this, until we move on and graduate from this chapter in our lives.
But for now, we are waking to see the sun together. I also know one other thing.
We should enjoy it. Sure, I could go all teen angst and say that high school sucks and that it’s just this superficial hellstorm that wastes years of your life. But I don’t want to do that. Cause while parts of that may be true, nothing is truly a waste. It isn’t the fact that high school is finite that should inspire you to live your time to the fullest; it’s that, within this small allotted amount of time, you are free to journey through the world. You always will be, and that, I think, is the only nice lesson high school may teach you.
You’re gonna be knocked down. You are gonna struggle.
But high school teaches you that it is never truly over.
So while we are together, let us be kind. Let us be one.
Let us push towards the future, which is the present, which will one day be the past. And when that time comes, we will have so much to look back on, but even more to look forward to.
“You just gotta keep livin’. L-I-V-I-N’.” – David Wooderson, Dazed and Confused 1993
