Missing Out and Moving Fast

It’s said that senior year is one of the fastest years of your entire life. It’s said that DURING senior year, boundless fun will occur. It’s said that DURING senior year, one should savor the time they have left at home, because a sure change is coming in the summer for those entering college.

However, for lack of a better word, all of these promises are lies.

I am one of those people who hold a rare sparkle of hope within their chest—one who believes words of “wisdom” (which often is uncovered as false hope), one who desperately wants to believe that life will work out the way it is promised. However, I’ve been awakened to the harsh reality of life this year, and the lack of sympathy of college deadlines, classroom deadlines, and senior duties.

Here I am. This person who desperately wants to go bake cookies with my nephew and feel a moment of relief from his 7-year-old giggle and wishes of Santa. For just a moment, I’d like to lie under my Christmas tree and revel at the fact that my mother and father (due to the fact that I’m the final child to leave the home) will probably never put our tree up again. Maybe I’d like to go ice skating or watch Elf without my laptop in front of me.

My. Christmastime. Is. Waning.

I have been promised this magical time, and alas I’ve opened a present in beautiful wrapping and silver bows to reach down into an empty, dusty box of coarse lies.

Perhaps it isn’t just the overwhelming deadlines and papers and planning. Perhaps it’s just that good ‘ol, “Senior year flies before your eyes in a blink of an eye!” magic that all of those seasoned adulty A-dults have promised us emerging stone rollers. I don’t know.

So this Christmas, I propose this to all seniors. Maybe if we all chipped in and wrote a letter to Santa asking for one measly single thing, we’d all get it: one more year to prepare.

One more year to be yelled at for breaking curfew, one more year of perfecting those grades, one more year to take a random visit to our grandmother’s and enjoy the incessant stories of ourselves in diapers, and one more year to drive off to the park and lay on the hoods of our cars and not crumple in the floor and breakdown because we think we missed the deadline for a scholarship to attend some college that will define us for the rest of our lives.

I know I’m not the only one who feels as if the man is impeding on their sleigh bell ringing. I call out to all of you lost, hopeless, panicking seniors and send words of comfort.

We are two weeks from being halfway done.

Shocking, right? Through all of this pushing to get to this point, we are here to one of many milestones to come. We’ve sped through it at a million miles per hour waiting on Friday and Saturday. We haven’t reveled in the fact that we are at school—that we are students. This is all coming to a close. One semester left and we will all take our final bow out of LCHS and embrace a whole new world of freedom and responsibility.

I remember as a kid we’d throw pop rocks on the ground at my grandmother’s house, and, inevitably, my cousin would pick up a fistful and throw them down all together. We’d have none after he’d do that, and be left pop rock-less and bored. This is the cycle of every student. We pick up a fistful of dates, and we try to rush past them as fast as we can to get to this one moment where we’re at the mall or we’re finally getting that lazy day. We miss the moments in between. We missed the funny joke our childhood friend made and we forget they’re moving half way across the country in June. We missed the beautiful morning we saw from our kitchen window while we were swallowing the remains of our Captain Crunch.

Don’t fast forward this time—embrace it. Maybe Santa Claus will hear our helpless pleas for more time and grant it.