Countdown on an "experience"

Today is the penultimate day of March.  The month after is April, then there's May, and then June.

Then I won't be in high school anymore.

I won't ever don a uniform again.  I won't fight to get into the crawlspace that is the small hall of lockers for senior girls.  I won't write or edit for my school newspaper anymore.  My teachers will become memories, memories will become names, names will become blurs.  And these people that I call friends, will they still be my friends come fall?  Will they miss me?  Will I miss them?

My mother once told me that life is a series of leaving people and people leaving you. My father constantly tells me that high school is the easy part, that it won't even be important or memorable or acknowledgeable at his age.

But what they might refer to, or I might refer to later, as an experience, is my life.  The average high schooler, even if they work all the time like me, has no idea what the outside world is like.  We have a ton of preconceived notions of being adults, but we have no reality to attach the cliches to yet.  This is still happening though.  I still force my way to my locker, I still eat the cafeteria food, and I'm still a kid. And if I'm anything like my parents, it appears as if these four last years won't mean in anything in the next ten.

I find it to be inaccurate, honestly. Events from middle school and elementary are still fixed in my brain, are still a part of the sum of the experiences that make me who I am.  Next year, high school will be lumped in with those.  Four years after, college will get lumped in too.  And in the autobiographical memories, I think they'll still be important.

The spelling bee I won at 10 is still important, as well as the first poem I wrote at 8.  Creating a writing compilation as a tear jerking thank-you gesture to a teacher at 12, performing in the church choir and in the school dance team--maybe my memory for good things goes a little farther back than my parents. In my freshman year of high school, I asked out my first boyfriend. I was so nervous, I shook and asked him to repeat himself because I couldn't believe he said yes.  I learned that I wasn't perfect--that despite being exceptionally smart, I still needed to work for what I wanted.  I figured out that repression and coping could be evil to my mental health, and that my own judgement wasn't as trustworthy as it was before all these new teenager questions got asked.  I nearly overcame my perpetual shyness, and now my quietness is more selective than ubiquitous.  High school wasn't a major catalyst.  There was no epiphany, nothing that might make my parents remember it.  It's just part of my growth.  And I think my progress, and I think everyone's progress is at least worth the acknowledgment, if not the memory.