An Ode To High School

Isn’t it funny how certain songs can catapult you to the time you first heard it ? Or the memory it’s tied too?  Music is a time machine requiring you to just close your eyes and enjoy the ride.

You’re shuffling songs on your iPod and Paramore’s “Misery Business” comes on. Suddenly  you’re in Grade 10 again, eating the cafeteria’s chicken burgers with so much mayonnaise it’s unsettling. You’re wearing the tightest skinny jeans you own from Hot Topic and anything you can buy with skulls on it, you have.

You wear eyeliner like a pirate and change your hair color multiple times every few months. You have a mouth full of braces and nobody told you to stop plucking your eyebrows. You have your core group of outcast friends and you talk about the boys you’re all crushing on, whom will never ever notice you, in 4th period math class.

Homework, boys and not going over your minutes on your ‘Pay As You Go’ cellular phone are your only worries. You eat like absolute crap and somehow it never shows. You go to countless Battle of the Bands with your best friend because you’re crushing on the lead singer of your schools garage band special. He thinks he’s hot shit because he gets to sing on a dinky stage past 9pm on a school night. Woah, dream big.

You’d walk to and from school discussing the events of the day. Oh, how it felt like that was all there was. That, that was all there’d ever be. It was so hard to imagine a life outside of it, scary even, to think that a whole other life would exist beyond high school. How beautiful was it to be asked what you wanted to be when you “ grew up” and have the options be limitless.

You weren’t cool, pretty, or popular, but damn did you make the best with what you had. You went on adventures, you laughed endlessly. You didn’t know what being in love felt like, but you sure as hell had friendships that little to your knowledge then, would still be going strong years later.

You can’t help but smile at the memories you made in those four years. Four years that felt more like ten years. Crazy how four years now feels like four months.

You wouldn’t dream of going back and making any changes because you have no regrets. You wouldn’t change the course of your life that would lead you to who you are now, that would lead you to the people you know now.

High school was the beautiful stepping stone to becoming an adult you could be proud of. Sure, you don’t remember a thing you learnt in any subject, but you learnt lessons that weren’t in the curriculum. Lessons that didn’t need textbooks, papers or pens. Lessons that no teacher could of taught you in a classroom.