Big and Shiny and Not On Display in Your Living Room

It's easy to forget why you're doing all this. You're retaking SAT's, killing yourself over AP's, working 40 hours a week, and you're letting yourself go to the point where fingerless gloves actually seem like extra and not a prerequisite for your daily ensemble.

Even if you do everything right and get straight A's (Obviously this example is this IDEAL student, not me) and you get into the college you've been dreaming about, what if at the finish line you can't go?  What if money becomes a large, overwhelming issue?  It'd be like getting to the finish line and getting to stare at the first place trophy, but not being able to take it home with you.

As the spring begins to bear down on us all, summer seems short and fall seems like it's already here.  Some kids drop their studies at this point with one foot in the door.  Spring is going to be a few more months, summer's going to be two months, and then we have the fall.

The autumn, the mighty fall, that first semester, the beginning of that first year, where it seems like everyone drops out.  What the hell was any of it for then?

All of my friends who are of college age dropped out in the first year or didn't go.  All four years of high school leading to up to a huge, disappointing, anticlimactic crapshoot.

You know, you just have to wonder if that's going to be you and if you're okay with that.

I know nothing but not knowing

Remembering someone who isn't there anymore. A hand held, a straight stare for miles into their eyes--it all rushes back to you, a feeling of flight into the past and happiness for what was. 

Sometimes the tease of a good memory can be like the tease of a girlfriend: an annoying little bitch. Sometimes it's more like a gamble you always lose. And at horrible times the memory perpetuates itself as something real because we let it. Gatsby let it ruin him. Porcelain let it erode  her will. The father in "Pretty In Pink" let it come between him and his daughter.

And what do these people have to show for it? A bullet to the heart? Wounds that don't heal? A ghost?

But it's not always death or trauma that makes these memories so painful to have. It's a rejection, someone who said no a long time ago. Someone who teased you with the idea that life was better with them and that home was with them. That they could save you from yourself. But nope. There's someone else to save, someone else to better, someone else to make a home with.

Ghosts of superheroes who didn't really exist. The angel who fell. The memories you can't be sure are memories, because they're so good they're fantastical. The ones you knew if they hadn't happened, you'd be better off because you can't miss someone that you don't know. But you do, because you think you used to know them.

I can be so blindly certain.

My principal likes to tell us, "The world is run by those who show up, on time."

I come in late a lot to school.  Sometimes purposely, sometimes just as an effect of waiting until one in the morning to start sleeping.  In college, we all imagine it's going to be different and we'll change our ways.

I think to some degree that's true.  Paying thousands of dollars a year for the crap you used to get for free could definitely change your mindset.  Especially for some of my friends, who worked overly and extremely hard to win scholarship money--but those are the kids who will arrive early and leave late because they want to chat up the professor and ask as many questions as possible. I mean, they do that now.  They've done it for the past four years.  But it's not like change is such a hurtle, so unheard of.  I've changed my opinions, religious views, and work ethics so many times and I'm only seventeen.  Perspective changes with both time and just what's happening.

But here's the thing: what student doesn't love to miss class? So many kids cut now, so many will in college, but so many of those kids will probably be part of the college-dropout-after-the-first-year statistic.  It may be cliche to say, but I don't want to be another statistic.  I seriously doubt I will; getting the money to go to college is such a hurtle in itself.  It'd be a complete waste of my time and energy if I was going to skip class or not do well.

What my real problem is, is my own personal apathy toward lateness and ditching.  I worry some of my friends won't graduate because they have that same apathy and that we're all watching our attendance rate to make sure it doesn't go below 90%.  I know I'll graduate; I'm a total expert at getting by at this point, even though I think this year's grades will prove that's not the only thing I want.

I don't know what I'm going to do in a real college class yet.  I want to graduate high school first.