Moving On

To me, high school is a story that will always stay with me. It will be remembered for the draining work and the infinite number of assignments given for each year, making it feel endless. And the irony of working so hard to get out of school for four years and wanting freedom, only to realize at the end that it’s scary to leave and move on, and what comes next. I stayed up late countless times to finish assignments to the last very second, because of how tiring it was to even be there that early almost every day, and finish these assignments in two days, to  even harder assignments.

The hallways were so crowded, people changing directions, no space to move or head the right way towards your class, and waiting for people to go by to be able to turn, people walking so slow like they are in slow motion. Sometimes you would have to go the wrong way to class to avoid running into people; it was like being in a maze, except you can’t control which direction to take. 

The school parking lot at the end of the day will always be a symbol of chaos, craziness wrapped around the sounds of engines revving and constant blaring horns. Everyone wanted to escape the school as fast as they could, like the craziness in the hallways and the students’ music blasting through their speakers, it was like stepping into a sound storm because of how loud and annoying it was. There never was a real line of cars waiting to go one after another, just a bunch of vehicles packed together waiting to cut off the next one. 

School felt like I was trying to survive against the clock, the very long and boring time in each class every day pushing me even closer to a future that I still don’t feel ready for. Teachers handed out assignments like robots, because they have done the same very thing probably a hundred times for years, just moving on to the next class. Every day at school didn’t feel like it was about learning, but about enduring the time and pressure to finish assignments at a due date, and that was the point of school, feeling like a machine tasked to do things at school to prepare me to be tasked at work to do the same thing for the rest of my life. 

When you leave high school, it’s not like a giant field you can run through and be free; it’s more like walking into opaque fog, you aren’t sure what’s next up in life, and it’s unsettling. 

Now life is not laid out as simply class periods and semesters, it’s laid out as a little bit of time to decide, and what choice do I want to choose for the rest of my life. 

One day, you’re just walking into your class like you do every day, and with no reminder or announcement, you realize it’s the last day you will sit in your seat and be in that classroom. The last day you will eat cafeteria food, sit with those random people in your school, and you probably will never see them again, you won’t be told this, but you will realize that it’s the end of it all, and you have to move on to bigger things in life. What those bigger things are for you to decide. College, work, responsibilities, adulthood. It might sound exciting for some who are finally out of school and ready to do what they have been waiting to do, it feels like I’m standing at the edge of something I can’t see the bottom of below me.

“Cincinnati Ohio – Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum ‘Foggy Road’” by David Paul Ohmer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.