It's Final

I'm a senior now.

Not senior as in senior citizen, though lately sitting at my desk all day with bad posture has been giving me neck problems. I mean high school senior. It's the final year for me, before my parents take their hands off my shoulders and I'm left with just my training wheels to keep from falling off the bike. It's the beginning of the year of endings.

At first, when I walked through the school at the end of August, I thought I ought to be depressed. One more year of excruciating torture upon the rack of public education, and then relief - only to be shipped off in a few more months to undergo the exquisite, privileged punishment of college? One more year of loitering aimlessly with a bunch of teenagers like me, and then watching most of them walk off the face of my world after graduation? One more year of carefree constraint, before - oh, I don't know - the ominous, inevitable, final, Cap and Gown?

I expected these thoughts to weigh on me for the rest of my high school days. I am terrified of endings, you see, almost as much as I am terrified of beginnings. I always feel like they have to be perfect.

But I wasn't depressed. Instead, plodding through paths jam-packed with both strangers and old friends, I felt a profound sense of warmth flood through me. There was a senior I'd known since freshman year, for instance. He'd had a growth spurt, and when he stood next to the WHS newcomers it became suddenly obvious how much he had changed. And then I passed the half-finished mural by the North Quad, and I thought to myself: Little guys have never known anything else. Not the washed-out Yosemite scenery buried beneath the paint; not the hours spent balancing on a rickety ladder with a paintbrush in hand, trying to figure out if the trumpet dude's head fits on his neck right. They've come into this school, and the first impression they ever had of this wall was the half-finished mural.

I'm a senior. I know things they don't. I'm at the top of the food chain, and I'm amazed that I managed to make it this far. Three years, and so much has happened - so many things I'd rather not repeat, but that I don't want to ever forget - so many things that made life worth loving. And I looked at the new kids and realized that, pretty soon, they're going to be where I am now. They're going to go through freshman year and sophomore year and junior year, and by the time they're seniors, they'll have changed. For better or for worse, nobody goes into high school and then comes out exactly the same. I can only pray that all these kids come out with both feet on the ground and head held high.

I was happy, ludicrous as that sounds, as I squeezed past all these young faces. They looked confused, sleepy, annoyed, and maybe a little scared. But if there's one thing they all had in common, it was a future. They're going to define what comes next in this place I've spent a third of my waking hours in for three years. Senior year isn't really an ending - I'll just be stepping off one chapter and into another. There will be plenty of others keeping the cycle going.

And I'm not done yet, either. I've still got a year before signing out of here, and I don't plan on letting it go to waste. I'll make the most of my last year in high school, enjoying the hell out of every day of my life - and that's final.