For some people, high school was the time of their life, four years of fun and glory. For others, high school was a time of utmost sorrow, a seemingly never ending series of painful days. For most, high school was a blur. Four years of vaguely negative, mostly neutral nonsense full of standardized testing and hormones. High school is ridiculous and difficult, and for most, just the lead up to what is a hopefully better college experience.
My memories of my high school are the very definition of fine, okay, average. I would not do it again, but I’m not irreparably damaged for having gone through it. Every break, one of my friends from high school insists upon visiting our high school. I understand that urge. High school is where we laughed and wept, lived and lost. Those tiny desks with their chairs unreasonably attached hold so many memories. There’s the classroom I took the SAT2’s in, there’s the gym I tried my best to avoid participating in, and there’s the bathroom I cried, brokenhearted. I loved a lot of high school teachers, some of the best and most devoted educators I’ve met as of yet. So my friends go back, park in their old favorite spots, and get their younger siblings to let them in the side doors. They wander the halls, with fewer and fewer faces that they recognize, and sheepishly tell our AP Calc teacher that no, we haven’t taken any math in college.
I could do that. I could recreate the photo present in this article of me napping on the floor in the middle of Econ. I could sing a few measures in the choir room, sit on top of the table in my favorite English teacher’s room, and I could find my freshman year locker. I could do that and, yet, I don’t.
My mom is fond of telling the story she read about the director of Bridesmaids. In an interview, he said that he would absolutely, completely and certainly, never go back to his high school or even a high school reunion. It’s not like this guy isn’t doing well for himself, but he, along with an extraordinary number of successful people, refuse to return to the scene of the crime. I don’t identify with the extremity of feeling largely because I was fortunate as to not have been a target of bullying or harassment. What I find interesting is that I also will never go back.
Maybe it’s because so much has happened since high school. Maybe it’s because I’m not sure if the person I was in high school would recognize the person I am now. Maybe it’s because I’m more similar than I realize to 16 year old Lily, but that internally, my entire being has shifted. That’s the funny thing about experiences and living them, sometimes the past becomes such a different world that it is inconceivable to imagine going back there. I love my friends from high school. I love the teachers who changed the way I thought and learned. I love thinking about the mornings I sat on the floor with my best friends before the first bell and thought about what it meant that this was, for the moment, our whole existence.
As I look forward to my sophomore year Thanksgiving break, I inevitably think about last year. I think about how I felt in my hometown, knowing that the life I was leading back at the school and the way I was letting someone treat me was destroying the person these streets had known. No one recognized me and no one knew how to tell me that in my eyes they only saw hollow pain. I think about driving past my high school and how I couldn’t even look at the doors, knowing that the girl I was then would have never thought she would let someone be this cruel to her.
In returning home there is the challenge of reconciling who you were and who you are, no matter how traumatic or peaceful your time away has been. This year is not last year and I am getting closer to being someone I’m proud of. And when someone inevitably asks me to go with them to visit our AP Psych teacher, I’ll tell them no. Sometimes, the present informs the past. High school, like I said, was fine, but in the time since I haven’t been. Those are not the roots I need to remind myself of, those hallways are not the ones I need to walk again. I’ll tell them to give my best wishes to those who remember me and I’ll happily pass my days at home without reliving my promposal.
Image credits: Lily Alig, playbuzz