Old

I was cleaning my room earlier and thinking about the future, which are both really really dangerous things to do separately but potentially suicidal when combined, and the only thing I could really comprehend was the sheer amount of life there is left to be lived. And the amount of it i've already started.

Like how in a few months, me and 952 of my closest friends will walk across a stage and shake the hand of a principal we never really knew, listen to the valedictorian give a speech about our bright futures, and sit awkwardly amongst peers we only vaguely recognize in a ceremony that formally closes our high school careers forever. and afterwards we'll take hundreds of pictures and give thousands of hugs and smile until our cheeks hurt. and then, after four years of (at some times unbearable but at most times unmemorable) high school, we'll be finished and on with our lives.

but I don't want high school to be so unmemorable. I'm realizing that it isn't the homecomings and proms and graduations we'll remember. its the millions of Starbucks runs during English class, the thousands of nights where we lied to our parents and partied far past our curfews, the hundreds of all nighters pulled worrying for precal, and the tens of exams where, when we inevitably were unprepared, we just marked "c", that all add up to the general feeling of nostalgia we'll get when we're 45 and we find an old yearbook.

We'll graduate college, get a degree (for some people, several), settle down and have a family and at some point, wonder exactly which decision it was that turned us into our parents. sorry for that pessimism. I haven't really been sleeping.

this was so convoluted. but I think it makes some sense. which is a paradox, and also a metaphor for the last four years.

-Kelly

ps hey Kevin