I...WHAT!?

Tomorrow I graduate...a bit of an interesting concept when you think about it. Tomorrow is quite factually the only time ever that our entire senior class will all be in the same room together. I don't really care for half of the people sitting around me, and honestly don't care if I never see 98.763 percent of the people sitting there with me again. I won't recognize a quarter of them after all these years, and some of them I really wish I didn't recognize. I can pretend to care, but in the end I have only one goal in mind, to get across that stage and get on with my life for good.

Above all, the one thing I really do take from high school is a cap on who I am now, and who I want to be as I look toward the future. You really get grounded in your last year of high school. Senior year is sort of a filter, like the mouth of a baleen whale. You pick through who your friends really are and you get a true sense of who will be your friends once this whole thing ends. Sometimes you find the best friends in the most unlikely of all places. You officially determine what your real interests are, squeezing the last free knowledge out of high school before you start paying the big bucks. And finally, you just realize it's not as sad as you think. Like the last page of a journal or book, you think it is sad to be writing it, but really, you get to open a fresh one when you are finished. Who doesn't like writing in an untouched notebook, where the pages are clean and fresh, the spirals are still spirals, not mushed pieces of crap, and everything is blank, waiting for you to take that first move, daring you to write the first word, to dirty it up with new mistakes and falters and moments of joy. I like that a lot, it's the best feeling in the world.

I didn't loathe high school, but at the same time I didn't love it. It's a neutral zone, and whoever made up the rule that it should last for four years was so right. That is just enough time to get things figured out, to mature to a point of independence, and to be ready for the next notebook.

I think I am content with that.