It’s ugly: all this change.

There are a million different ways to wrap things up into pretty little packages and present, always presenting, but I do that, have been doing that. Every day since I began high school, every day of my life, it’s a face it’s a story it’s contradicting fact with fiction and twisting and narrating things into what I want you to see and to know and to hear to perceive them differently. 

There are a million different metaphors tired, used up by me in my time and my unfaltering necessity to perform. But now that it’s time for me to go there’s not a thought in my brain to paint a beautiful picture for you of what is and what has been. 

My entire life has felt like a set-up for something greater. Something unnamed and unknown but always looming. From the beginning, I was a soccer star, a goalie who had a knack for kicking people’s shins as my life depended on it, but my brother took that one, minus the violence, sort of, and I moved forward. Next, six years of my life would be spent pulling pieces of myself off of mirrors in dance studios, mirrors in my room, overwhelmed with concern about comparisons and petty failures, and I moved forward. I then decided to give volleyball a try, where I started late and finished late, all the same, I ruined things for myself, and I moved forward.

I want to tell you that my sophomore year start at The Central Trend was a precipice, a moment, a movement. But maybe I’m not quite in a place where I can say that yet, for if you ask me now it was nothing but shortcomings and disappointments.

Room 139/140 saw so much of me, those people saw so much of me, and I want to take this opportunity now to apologize for letting everything get in the way and leaving only the worst to be perceived during sixth hour.

I’ve spent the past year sitting on the sidelines knowing I could do better than what was being done; wishing for opportunities that had either long slipped out of my grasp or that were never going to come.

I don’t think I’ve ever done my best work, maybe I have and this is it for me, but I would like to think that there is better out there somewhere farther. Not editor but social media manager, not Syracuse but State. I’ve been walking a fine line between holding the majority of my blame on others and on myself. I heard somebody say that I’m unreliable, maybe that’s true, but I’ve been turning it over and over again in my brain and I still can’t quite figure out what I did to deserve that.

And believe me when I tell you I don’t want to be that person, for I have been that person. So I picked myself up and started writing again, but like clockwork, it fell apart and I fell within myself where none of the dumpster fire that is that situation could touch me. There have been many times where I find myself in a rhythm of sad columns with impossible meanings, and I want to be that passionate editorialist that I once was, but what I’ve found is that the issue with deciding that something unnamed and unknown but always looming doesn’t matter anymore, really just makes nothing matter anymore, including yourself. Your writing, your fire, your drive—my writing, my fire, my drive.
I could leave on a hopeful note, leave everything in the past dead and buried and so far behind me it’s not even dust in the distance, but I want to finally be heard.

The truth is that nobody is a beautiful person. That’s impossible. It doesn’t exist. There are also a lot of people who don’t have an ounce of goodness inside of them, more like chasms filled with ghosts that exist purely to swallow you whole. Not everyone at this school is one of those people, a lot of us are just broken, but I’ve come across a few to count in the ranks of the general population. I look forward to seeing so many of us heal and grow and maybe discover some other version of change—one that isn’t so jarring—but some people never will, and they will continue to place the hurt within themselves unto others thinking that they’re snotting some sort of ink-black congestion but are really just leaving more space for chasms of nothingness, turning themselves into hollowed-out shells.

I try every day to reflect, to somehow stare hard enough at the ceiling to prevent the above from becoming my reality, but I see now that there’s so much juxtaposition between the person I am and the person I want to be—what is and what has been and what is to come. A lot of people sum up their high school years as “a roller coaster ride,” but that just sounds like another pretty little presentable package to me, so I’m going to opt-out and describe it more as B.E.D. (before editor decisions) and A.E.D. (you get the idea).

While that was an end, my writing here is an end, my words will have to find a new home. I can see the growth I have achieved as both a journalist and as a human being. Nothing is the same as it was, nothing hurts as much as it did, and now I move forward to the next blank page of my own design; yet another untitled document to be filled, but with new places and faces and experiences that are untouchable by the past.

And now I move forward into the unknown, to apply elsewhere, to be elsewhere, but I will always carry the prospect of this experience, of The Central Trend, with me—beginning chapters.

Time: 11:10.