School for most people means the end of freedom and the beginning of pointlessly complex math equations that won’t help you in life unless you become a rocket scientist. I would agree with most people. However, the past few years I’ve looked forward to summer ending and school starting. I don’t hate summer, it just represents something in the back of my head that I don’t want to accept.
In the past, summer was what I looked forward to most every year. What’s not to look forward to? You can stay up late, you’re free of responsibility, and you can do things with your friends as often as you want. But as I got into high school, summer wasn’t so luxurious anymore.
The friends I used to spend every day with before weren’t around anymore or just weren’t the same people as they used to be. The lack of responsibility was filled with the notion that it’s time for me to get a job, to stop relying on other people for money and food, which would be normal if I were a few years younger. I was filled with shame that I wasn’t doing what I should be at my age. So summer, which used to be the ideal time to be a child, has ironically come to represent growing up in my mind.
School is the opposite.
School is where the people you know are, where the people you knew are, and the people you will know are. It somehow formulates into something like nostalgia, nostalgia for what I’m living in at the present. I miss it already because it won’t be the same in nine months when school lets out. At this age, nothing is permanent.
There’s something tragically romantic about it all that only a John Hughes movie could capture. People take every day so seriously when they should just be enjoying what the have at the moment, because the friends they have now might not be the friends they have in a year. These are the last days we have before true responsibility takes over, when we’re not-so-gently pushed from the nest and are forced to fly or fall.
I just try and enjoy the people in my life now before I can’t anymore, and school is the place for that.
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