my high school was a disaster.
the building was supposed to be a preschool in the 1980s, but they just bought some bigger chairs and tossed us in. there was one functioning toilet, and our gym also served as our cafeteria, and our designated hangout spot. if we wanted it to turn into an auditorium, kids would prop up a stage, ikea furniture-style. there was a rat that lived in the ceiling of the physics room and our teacher brought a hamster ball to school, convinced it was going to be our classroom pet. once, i found a loose pop tart amid a pile of dust that had built up in the corner of one of our four hallways
we were supposed to be some high-ranking school in the state, a pipeline right into the ass crack of john harvard himself. well, you can figure the reality. it was a public charter school, but we used to joke that it was like the hunger games: kids from districts all over the suburbs of metro detroit, thrown together in this disgusting, popcorn-walled building to fight it out until graduation day. there were kids who were hospitalized from stress, or people who had to drop out for mental health reasons. no one ever really spoke about it.
it was my pressure cooker. you could tell some adults tried really hard to make it a fun place. and it almost worked. but a lot of them loved advertising that we were this “academically rigorous” school, and that would guarantee our spots at top stem programs and ivies and make us successful forever and ever. it’s how they advertised it to parents, at least. but it also made the inverse true: if you weren’t doing well here, you were a failure. you weren’t worthy. your life was already over. and some teachers told me, in no uncertain terms, that i just wasn’t going to make it. see: 16-year-old me getting told by an english teacher, “i just don’t think you’re a leader.”
i still have friends from high school, but we rarely discuss it. the physical components of the place — four walls, one floor, one roof — remind me of too much of the awkward teenage years and then some more.
last week, my history teacher passed away at 33 years old. she was one of the teachers that actually liked me, and was universally admired by her students. she took the time to try and know us. to be very honest though, i don’t make out some delusion of having a special connection; we all felt a deep affection towards her, because she was a great teacher. she gave me the allowance to consider myself worthy of something. anything. i know i am only one of hundreds whose life was impacted by her.
i was in her class, in junior year of high school, when i found out my childhood best friend died. she was the only person i talked to regularly since i’d moved back to america. i guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise. but she was 15, and impossibly smart, so i just figured she’d find some way to outlive the expectations. when you’re young, you don’t always know that’s not how it works. everyone is always so busy talking of what is to come.
my history teacher let me off the hook, so i just went to the library and cried for a while. her birthday is this week. she would have been 24.
grief is a lonely feeling, and difficult to articulate in detail without getting into the fear of coming off as self-serving. like getting up to pee in the middle of the night and catching yourself in the mirror — who the fuck is that? we allow ourselves small portions of it, depending on what we determine to be the appropriate emotion. so sad, we say to each other. so, so sad.
i always find myself struggling with just how big a serving of grief i am allowed. the only way out is through, they say, but in these times, through to what? grief has enveloped us entirely for years, and still, we go out for drinks and make small talk at brunch, determinedly avoiding looking up to see the cloud of suffering undulating above us. we have no good solution.
so sad, we say to each other. so, so sad.
even now, i’m giving myself the ick even talking about it. is this narcissistic? is this performative? but it’s something i’ve been turning it over and over in my mind. i keep going back to the teenage girl who cried between the bookshelves of our library, learning the gluttony of unrelenting grief. how it can hold you and keep you there for a long time.
oh, there’s no answer here. i don’t know if you were thinking i’d have a tidbit to offer you. i just know hundreds of students are feeling what i feel right now. millions of friends have probably felt what i felt. i think i am allowing myself a little melancholy for that grimy little box of a building, for what it’s probably seen (grief, sex, loneliness). it’s easier to think about it all when i compartmentalize it into little bits like this. we’re existing in a time with grief is synonymous with life itself. i think today it will do me some good to glance quickly at it.
my grandma believed the souls that shaped us are always with us, ki-ki’ing together.