Doors

Last night, I graduated high school. I didn't attribute it much significance at the time (being more given to making snarky commentary and focusing on not messing up my salutatorian speech), but now I feel... something. I don't usually feel things, so I can't tell what it is. I can taste it though; it's bittersweet and surprising, like dark chocolate when you were expecting sugar-coated peeps. It's less colorful than I wanted. Now I have all summer to clean out my old life, get ready for college, and prepare to reinvent myself. I should be gearing up for fresh independence and power. And yet, I keep remembering all my old classmates and teachers, how much fun they all were, how accepting they all were of me as a person and a student. Also, they were quite a lot of fun.

For our senior trip, we ended having a picnic at our principle's house and playing Do You Love Your Neighbor. We sat in a big circle, and the person in the middle had to pick someone. If they loved their neighbors, the people sitting on either side of them had to switch places while the person in the middle had to try to grab one of their places. If they didn't love their neighbors, they had to love everyone with a certain trait (like wearing white socks), and everyone with that trait had to find a new spot. Of course, someone always ended up in the middle. Kathy "loved" everyone who had ever cut a class. All the students except three moved.

Last summer, three other girls and I went skinny dipping in a park at night and were caught my the sherriff. When he pulled up, we all dove underwater and hoped he wouldn't be able to see us with his headlights  reflecting off the surface of the lake. The problem with being underwater is that there's no way to breathe unless you have special equipment, and we did not have special equipment. Also, it's hard to figure out what's going on when you're struggling to breathe and be underwater at the same time. Only one of us realized that the sherriff had already seen our clothes and us when we came up for air, and she was calmly pretending that we hadn't realized we weren't supposed to be here while the rest of us kept floundering around and gasping. Once the sherriff told us we needed to leave and drove away, we got out, got dressed, and walked back home. On the way home, we were pulled over and picked up by another guy in a sherriff's car. While he talked on his little radio about us (apparently the mother of the girl whose house we were staying at had called the police because we were so long gone on our "walk"), one of us suddenly whispered,"Oh crap! It's the guy from the lake." And then we all got a very awkward ride home after the sherriff casually asked us if we were the girls from the lake.

There were only thirty people in my senior class, and I've had many more adventures like this one with them (maybe not as intimate as this one, though). I may never see most of these people again. Where do I go from here? I have to make a new life for myself, starting this summer. A door has closed on my high school experience, and I can only hope a few more doors have opened that I just can't see now.