All the nights we stayed up talking and listening to 80s songs
Conestoga starts school in two weeks. I know this for two reasons: 1. The TE School District always starts on the Wednesday after Labor Day, 2. We were mailed the district calendar a couple weeks back and it's up on our fridge already flipped to the September page.
The first day of school was always distinctly a "first day of school". With the exception of calc, I don't think I did a single bit of learning in any of the thirty-two "first day" class periods I had the past four years. The details are blurry but I remember the health screenings: height, weight, eyesight where kids would gasp and hug and squeal and jump and howwasyoursummer? and everything, making the health screening longer than it needed to be eventually resulting in a class missed.
The homeroom teacher (Brier, Brier, Hall, Hall) would hand out colorful paper (that I would always end up accidentally throwing away and would have to go down to the main office at the end of the week because I hadn't handed them in) and collect forms from bookbags with the dotted lines for where you cut the agreement to abide by library internet standards. Nobody would ever cut at the dotted lines and Caroline, after sophomore year, would complain that she had to cut the forms as a library aide. We would ignore Donnovan if he came over the intercom and move our chairs to our very-end-of-the-alphabet corner so we could talk about the summer, about courses, about teachers, about friends, about who has what lunch, about college, about hating how we had to start school again, about whatever we felt talking about to pass the time.
Lunch comes (A, C that was actually D and A on day 6, C where the multicultural lunch group was established, and B through D--6th free except on day 5 wOOt) and we look around to find our group and hopefully collect enough friends in our group to colonize and own a certain table for the rest of the year. This class seems cool, this class blows, this teacher rules, this teacher's Koenig, when does lunch end?, they'll make an announcement. Back to class.
And by the end of the day our bookbags are full and we're carrying our psych/lit/lang books in our arms because they're not standard size. Well, we're halfway through the week. Only nine months left.
Despite how four years seems really long, high school almost feels like it should be longer. Don't get me wrong, certain marking periods like 4th MP of freshman year and certain classes like US with John 2nd period were excruciatingly long and painful, but it's odd to be completely out of the public school system. I know graduation was almost three months ago but that entire experience was so anti-climactic that I think I'm still easing into the idea that high school is over even though I have been fully aware since June 5th that I am no longer a Conestoga High School Student.
I've been saying goodbye a lot recently. And I'll say many more the rest of this week. I put my Gradufest playlist on shuffle when I pack so I've been cycling through the same 4.6 hours of songs the past week or so. The songs remind me of the first real event of the summer, which sometimes feel as if it just happened and sometimes feel as if it happened ages ago. Summer has been dwindling since the beginning of the month and will officially end for me this Saturday morning
I'm long overdue for the bursting-into-tears thing everyone's supposed to do.