High School

You are never going to escape high school. It will be the setting of the next movie you fall asleep to and there will be an adolescent narrator in the subsequent book you forget to finish. There is nothing more universal than these four years (the characters, the conflicts, the emotions) and the world is obsessed with that. A screenwriter is still stuck on his high school crush, he writes a movie about her. A thirty-year old holding a champagne flute at a party leans against a wall and rhapsodizes on becoming a chemist, a career she chose as a result of having an amazing chemistry teacher in tenth grade. We will stalk our peers on Facebook for the rest of lives.Why can’t any of us get over it? We remember high school with such clarity because we were experiencing things for the first time. Everything is a novelty. And not just the cliches of alcohol and sex, but things like making friends that are cooler than you, discovering what it is you want to spend all your time doing, driving on the 405 at 11 p.m., eating tacos on the hood of a date’s car. In AP Psychology, we learned that there is a “reminiscence bump” from the ages of 11 to 20, meaning this is the part of our lives that we will remember the best. Sitting in plastic chairs and eating sandwiches out of paper bags, we form lifelong opinions about morality, time, JD Salinger and what tea flavor is best.I am grateful for high school. For one, it was light-years better than middle school. There is more room for individuality and less concern about how much physical space your words or body take up. The repetition of similar classes with identical wall decorations can numb consciousness, but it can also assuage those nasty side effects of consciousness. (Dostoevsky wrote that the result of consciousness is “a soap-bubble and inertia”). High school offers stability and forward motion. If you sit in the same seat everyday, you will forget that you once refused to cross your legs because you thought it made your thighs look fat. You will cross your legs because it is comfortable. If your heart bulldozes your body and inflames your cheeks when you are called on in class, it certainly won't continue afflicting you after days of exposure reading for Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”At the same time, the microcosm of high school is an extremely rich source of inspiration and thought. As a writer, I always have a fully developed world to set my stories in. It terrifies that me that I only have four months left to write authentically about high school, but I am comforted by the fact that experiencing art about high school doesn’t end with my diploma. I am excited to view high school from the outside, contemplate with greater perspective, and watch what those after me make of this beautiful, sweaty and sincere time.