As much as many of us like to say we hated high school and wouldn't dare step foot in that prison again, there are some things about it we can't admit to hating. There were bound to be memories made during those four years that we'd like to hold onto, or teachers that felt more like friends to us than our actual friends.
And if this place made an imprint so deep on our hearts and memories that we'd never forget it, then we must have done the same in return, right?
Wrong.
Being on my Spring break, I told my favorite teacher/Facebook friend that I would visit her at the High School. I had visited last year, and it was kind of nice seeing old teachers and underclassmen friends. What harm could there be in going again? Oh, if only I knew.
Dorothy got off easy; when she went to the strange and scary place, it was all just a tornado-induced dream! Well, tornados don't happen in Leominster; this was so unfortunately real...
As soon as I parked, I knew it was a mistake. Two years of freedom felt like too many steps taken forward, just to turn around and take them all back. It took Andy twenty years in Shawshank Redemption to dig an escape tunnel out of his prison cell, and here I was walking right back into mine.
Walking through the doors with my friend and seeing the same teachers on guard for tardy students, I began to sweat. The heat was unbearable, and I knew it wasn't due to the knee length coats we had on—the coats that made us stick out like sore thumbs because while college kids need them to get to class without becoming a popsicle, high school students don't need them to sit inside all day.
No, I was sweating because nothing in that big, old building had changed... except for us. We changed so much that it was too uncomfortably obvious how much we didn't belong. Fish-out-of-water can't begin to cover it.
As hard as I tried to avoid it, I ran into past teachers and old acquaintances on my way. One guy asked if I needed help finding my away around, which just confirmed how I horribly hid my terror by just looking plain lost. In an embarrassing encounter, one teacher remembered me but not my name, and I could hardly blame him.
During the four years we spend in high school, we are that school. We are the captains of the football team, we are the presidents of Student Council, and we are the Valedictorians. However, we fail to realize sometimes that once we leave, someone else will become the captain of the football team, the President of Student Council, and the Valedictorian.
Students will come and go every single year, and the ones who go will become distant memories to some, and hardly memories at all to others.
That's simply the way it is; it's the way it always is, and not just in high school.
There will, however, be the teachers and the classmates that we did make an impact on, and those people will stay in our lives— whether they reappear every day, at the occasional lunch, in the comments on one of our Facebook posts, or even just at our weddings.
The impression we leave is not always on our schools, but usually on the people that were in them with us, and they eventually leave that place too. So, while we like the idea of taking a trip down memory lane and going back to high school, eventually there comes a time when it becomes better to move on and let High School be just a memory.
Ms. D, I'm sorry I left three minutes after I told you I'd come back the next period, but the smell of unhygienic freshmen and the dim hospital-esque lighting of the halls were just too much. With every step deeper into the school, the more washed-up I felt. I'll see you again, and I do miss you, but for the love of everything right in this world, do not make me go back to that high school. I spent my time there, but I'm done now, and it's just not my place anymore. It's time for it to be someone else's.
It took me being the weird college girl who had to come back to high school to see it, but I will never step foot in that prison again. I mean it this time.
