This isn't an abnormal occurrence—I've gone back at least once a year (and usually more than that) since I graduated back in June of 2014. I've gone back because I still had friends there, because I wanted to check up on them and be there and see them graduate. I've gone back on school days and on weekends, at times when I needed a little reminder of where I've been and at times when I just felt like making a visit. It's not unusual for me to drop in from time to time, just to see what's going on.
The difference now is that my friends are gone. They've graduated, moved on, and I'm not especially close to most of them anymore—such is life, right? I see some of them occasionally, but they're not on that campus anymore. They aren't still walking those halls. This year's seniors were freshmen the year I graduated, and when I go back to visit next year, there won't be any students left who were there at the same time I was.
Those people—both my friends and the ones who simply shared those halls with me—aren't the reason why I go back, if I'm being honest.
That campus is something out of a dream. That campus is unreal, beautiful, and incredibly separated from everything else that's going on in the world—I suppose that was the whole point, though, wasn't it? The Senior School was built on that land to give its students an escape from the city, a beautiful place to learn and grow and become something, though what that something should be is entirely up for debate, at least in my mind.
That campus has my name on it, quite literally. There is a brick in the walkway across the quad with my name carved into it, and while that probably seems absurd (and is absurd), that's just the way of things at the Academy. When you graduate, you get your brick, and that's the end of it. It's there to mark your presence on that campus, whether you'd been attending that school for twelve years or two, to say that you fulfilled the requirements and accepted your diploma.
When I was in high school, that brick was everything. That brick was the finish line, the sign that I'd made it through, and there was more than one occasion where, when I was miserable, my mother would tell me I could switch schools if it was really so bad, and my only response was "I'm going to get my brick." I was going to leave my mark on that campus, even if it—and my presence—didn't mean anything to anyone else.
They did (and do) mean something, though.
When I went back on Friday, I pulled into a space in the Hillman lot (while laughing at the fact that all of the students have to park in the baseball lot right now—sucks to be you) and I walked up those stairs and across that quad, and then I wound my way through the groups of students leaving their classes and going to lunch—students that I don't recognize, students who probably don't know me at all even though over a hundred of them heard the speech I gave senior year—and I walked into the history office. I walked into the history office to find my teacher from sophomore and junior year sitting there talking to some other members of the department, and that was that.
We talked for a bit, and I updated him on what was going on in my life, and he asked me if I'd been having a lot of Charlie Brown moments recently—a reference that only really means something to the two of us, a reference to something he used to do to make me laugh at my own sadness, even if it only lasted a second—and I wasn't lying when I grinned and said "No, we're past that." I'm not past having panic attacks and depressive episodes—I'll probably never be past that completely—but I'm past hating the world every day.
I'm past being unable to say "Good" and mean it when people ask me how I'm doing. I'm past medicating my way through school days with ibuprofen and caffeine, and then crashing immediately after getting home on Friday because I'm physically exhausted from being unable to sleep. I'm past spending more time sad than I am happy, past blaming myself, past the guilt and the inability to let go. I'm a lot stronger than I used to be, better than I used to be, and I have to make sure he knows that because he checked up on me every day and that made it easier.
(He still refers to me with the exact same form of address that he did in high school, and I'm really glad that hasn't changed. It's like walking into a memory without having to remember all the bad parts.)
Then he had to leave to go meet with his advisee, so I wandered twenty feet down the hall, only to run into my OChem teacher. He was about to leave to go to WPIALs with the swim team, but we talked for a while and I told him about my internship and made him laugh with the remark that "I've been told I should get a full-time offer at the end as long as I don't burn the building down." I made a comment about how strange I found it that I was going to be graduating from college in just over a year, and he told me that life only gets stranger.
He told me that I'm one of the only people who seems to have managed to be reflective on my time at that school, that it's obvious that I learned something there, and he isn't wrong, but I've never done it on purpose. My reflections in high school—all those blog posts and journal entries I wrote, all those drafts of my senior sage—were things that I was doing to process something bigger, to process my own mental state rather than what was going on at school. I learned a lot along the way without meaning to, and it was impossible to forget how fortunate I was while I was there—the world I come from is not the world of most of my classmates, and I've never been able to forget that, even as I've learned how to pretend that that isn't the case.
And then he had to go meet the swim team so that they could head to my university for WPIALs, and I wandered out of the building and across campus to the dining hall, where I found my Frisbee coach/unofficial psychologist/actual favorite person from that school, whom I hadn't seen since June. We wandered back from the dining hall to sit outside the history office, where we talked about what I was doing, about my brother, about politics, and it was like it used to be, only it wasn't, because I'm no longer the person that I was all those times that he would sit with me during free periods to talk me down from that cliff I was in danger of jumping off of.
I'm not that person anymore. I haven't been that person in a long time, and yet I still keep going back, and that difference is the exact reason why.
I was miserable when I walked those halls every day, trying relentlessly to hold onto my sanity and keep pushing forward even when it felt like I couldn't. It wasn't the school that did that to me—it was my past and my brain—but being there certainly didn't help. I knew I didn't fit the mold while I was there, much as I tried to, and my bitterness and cynicism didn't exactly endear me to my peers. I did what I could to get through it, and a lot of that meant talking to the adults who surrounded me.
My algebra and calculus teachers are no longer there—they retired the same year I graduated—but they always looked out for me. They believed in my intelligence even when I wasn't sure of it, and I still have my calculus teacher's advising comments from third term senior year. They're saved in my filing cabinet in my room, where I can pull them out whenever I need a reminder that one of the most brilliant people I know thinks that I underestimate my own abilities and my own mind, though I've been doing that much less often as of late.
I can't go back for them, but I can go back for the others. I can go back for the teachers who supported me, who talked to me after school or during free periods, who knew that things weren't always as I would've liked inside my head, who cut me a break when I needed it but still pushed me to succeed anyhow. I did some of my best work in my most difficult classes, managed to produce things that I'm still proud of to this day, and that serves as an excellent reminder when I'm stressed out in college—if I could do that, all of that, when my mind wasn't with me, then I can definitely do way more when it is.
I can go back to show them that they didn't waste their time on me, that their effort and their support was appreciated, that it worked and it let me move forward and make something of myself. I can go back to show them that while some people might move on without ever considering what they're leaving behind, I haven't forgotten and I never will. I might not visit so much after next year, after I graduate and start working full-time, but it's always going to be there in the back of my mind.
I go back because that place grounds me, because it reminds me of how absurd this whole thing that we call life is, because that brick in that walkway on that quad is proof that I was there even if I'm the only one that it matters to. I go back because now, when I walk those halls, I don't feel small. I don't feel out of place. I feel like I've been let in on this great big secret that none of the students there currently understand—this great big secret that some of them may never understand—and it makes everything easier. I go back because I finally learned. All it took for me to do it was leaving.
I'm not who I used to be. I'm not who I was when I was there. I'm more hopeful, more driven, more successful (more sarcastic). I'm not trapped in my own thoughts anymore. I've achieved a lot that I'm proud of (as I have every right to be) and I don't feel the need to shrink myself anymore. I've earned the right to be comfortable with who I am, and while I may look back on some things that could've gone a lot better, I've made my peace with them. I've made my peace with the past, and I'm not living in it anymore.
I don't go back to be there. I go back because that's how I know that I'm never really going back. It's over, and it's done, and I can give my thanks without longing for what was.
I don't long for it because I didn't peak in high school, and I feel sorry for all the people who did.
(Although, I will admit that it's a
Until next time x
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