This is probably the only thing I want to remember from high school. I'd like to leave teenage angst, shitty family problems, the tramp stamp and my chubby self complete with terrible dyke haircut back in '04. At least I can leave everything in the past but the tramp stamp- that one's with me forever! Without further ado here it is; I tried to think of the nicest way possible to say "peace out mother fuckers!!!"
Bridges
When you think of a bridge, you probably consider a strong structure that connects a gap between two places, like a bridge over water or a bridge over a highway. Well, I consider high school a bridge. It’s a stable structure. It provides shelter and it carries you for four years from one point in your life to another. When you leave high school, you move on and cross many more bridges to create your own path in life.
Over the four years that we spend in high school, we change very much. We become molded into individuals with every choice we make. Throughout our senior year many people remind us of how much we have changed and grown since middle school and even ninth grade. When I first stepped foot into this high school just four years ago, I was a scared and fragile thirteen year old. It seems to me that we were all much different people back then. Before I crossed the bridge over to high school, I hadn’t thought about the path ahead and the next bridge that would take me to college. I didn’t realize how important high school was in the big picture. Going out on the weekends, going to all the football games and making sure I attended all the parties seemed like all that was important to me. However, as the years went on, my priorities changed as I matured and I became wiser in realizing that these things were no longer as important to me. Somewhere along my path, I crossed the bridge from childhood to adulthood. I didn’t care anymore if people liked me. I didn’t care anymore if being smart meant that I wasn’t going to be cool. I aimed my focus towards my studies so that I could take the next step in my life with ease-the bridge to college.
Thinking back, high school was an important bridge that brought us from middle school into the unknown world of adulthood. Crossing this bridge, getting through these past four years, has certainly been an obstacle. For some of us, these past four years of our adolescence will have been the best. For others, like myself, these years could have possibly have been the worst.
For a long time, I was all too eager to burn this bridge we’ve just crossed and forget about high school, as I’m sure many of you would also like to do. It wasn’t until I read a play in English class by Tom Stoppard entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that I changed my perspective. One of the characters in this play said “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered”. This quote is extremely significant to us today because as much as we struggled, and however much our eyes watered in these past four years, we learned more. Not just scholastic lessons, but imperative lessons that we will need for the rest of our lives. Whether it be as personal as discovering who you are, or as trivial as perfecting a math equation, we’ve all learned something and grown from it. Through these lessons, the majority of us have even found ourselves becoming adults. Who would’ve thought? I know we’re all sick of being lectured but I just wanted to leave you with this thought. Never burn the bridges that you cross because the people you have met, the lessons you have learned, and the steps you have taken to get from one side to the other have made you who you are today. This bridge has hopefully transformed you from that awkward middle-schooler to a distinguished individual. Congratulations class of 2004 and as Abraham Lincoln once said, “I bid you an affectionate fair well.”
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