High School,

I still think about you all the time. Not Montevallo High School, the building, but the people that I have roamed your hallways with, the fun teachers that have taught me in your classrooms, and the teammates and coaches that I played my heart out for in your gym. You said goodbye to me, but I wasn't ready to say goodbye to you. As I gave my speech in my cap and gown as a salutatorian, I didn't really understand how much the words that I wrote and spoke out really meant to me. I knew you impacted my life, but in that moment, I couldn't quite grasp just how much. I long to be with you again. The simplicity of spending my late nights decorating hallways for homecoming rather than having my face shoved in a book, and the joys of letting my boyfriend take me to a football game and buying me hot chocolate because neither of us had homework and we were only twenty minutes away from each other then.

You were so good to me. You gave me friends to last a lifetime and memories that I will not only keep in my mind but in my heart also. You gave me the best years of my life so far, and I can't thank you enough. I feel as if it were a dream, it was like "High School Musical" but there wasn't much singing (except for all the times we belted out in AP Biology). And there weren't any Troy's or Gabriella's, we were all the main characters. We actually broke the status quo. I grew up with these people and I just could only wish that we would've all went to the same college together, but that's not real life. We're all in our own separate places, and working on becoming adults, that's real life. Every single one of my classmates has impacted who I am and who I'm going to be. And I'm so glad that God led us all to you, MHS. I just pray that all senior classes to come have a bond like we did, because there is nothing more beautiful than such a diverse group loving each other like we did. The world needs to get a taste of what we had and let it get ahold of it because that's what life is about. Life is about each other, not yourself, not a race, not a gender: each other. Everyone says that you find yourself in college; no, I found myself in high school, in the midst of not being absorbed in myself but by the people around me that made me happy to be in the moment that I was in. So maybe I didn't retain everything that was taught to me in math class or remember everything I presented for science, but I will remember what you taught me about life — that it can be wonderful. All of us were looking ahead to try and figure out when our lives would become perfect, but little did we know that it already was.