Stream of Consciousness- The Third High School Library

11/25/18

I remember when I was younger, all I wanted to do was wake up.  You could think of this scene as me taking a nap during study period, my head in my hands, my hands on the table; and me looking up.  This is what you would see if you weren’t me.  From my point of view, waking up meant going back to the way things were before. Now I realize that this will never happen.  This is so because phases mean that we continually change.  We don’t go back from one point, we go from one thing to the next.

Whenever I looked up from my nap during free period, I felt sleepy, but in almost a good way.  This was the third high school I had been to.  The first, I was pretty, the second, cool, the third, lost- because I was all alone in a high school I would have used to think of as dorky; not just because of the alien religion that I knew almost nothing about, but because I could not see the kids that went there as like the people that went to my first school.  The first school I couldn’t handle.  The second, an all-girl school, I would have been a super star at, had it been my first school.  The third school, a lot of people hated me.

I remember one time I ditched class and told the teacher that it was because a boy had made fun of me.  He had done so before, but I remember, that instant, I just used past experience as an excuse.  He had Photography with me.  Next to the dark room was the place where he had shop class.  I remember him making something and me watching him, as I was outside of the shop room.  I remember his friend who was a girl told in the same place that he walked by me and didn’t look at me but knew that I was looking at him, saying that her boyfriend had twisted his ankle or broken his leg playing basketball.  Or was the shop class kid the one who got hurt?  This was seventeen years ago.  All I remember is the red glowing, emitting, from the photography lab.  I didn’t study for the big test- a matching of letters to definitions.  I had the wrong kind of camera with the wrong kind of film.  I was too intimidated to take any sports pictures because that was a school event. 

I learned later in college when I took a photography class that with pictures with action and fast-happening events, that you had to have a bigger shutter speed.  The best picture I took was one of my cousin swinging on monkey bars at the park by my house.  A girl in my photography class at the local community college said, in response to that picture (wording may vary, but this is the idea,) “It is good, but it would be so much better if it was burned.”  I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I knew what she meant- part of the picture was too white, in contrast with the rest of the black and white picture.  I remember the photo shop assistant offering to help me burn, or manipulate the shading, in a sense, to the picture, but I turned him down, because it felt like a waste of time, at the moment.  Now I wish I could go back and make that picture perfect. 

The library at the third school was small.  I remember wearing my Old Navy long sleeve t-shirt, the one with the number ‘29’ on the back.  I didn’t know what the number meant, but the shirt was comfortable.  I remember wearing the green J-Crew sweater my mom ordered from online to class with my black pants. 

I slept way too much in class.  I slept through chemistry at the fourth school.  I slept through the movie that the second high school went to- actually in a theater.  I slept through my first attempt at the ACT’s, and a teacher announced it out loud to the class.  The second time I took the ACT, I forgot to bring my Social Security Number, but the staff still let me take it.  I b-essed my way through the science part, the content of which I had probably slept through in school. 

Every time I fell asleep, those days, I almost went numb.  Was me leaving high school what made me a better student?  All I know is that I still haven’t fully woken up.