Page 71 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #6

An Ode to Ex-High School Friends
We had friends who liked Scandinavian black metal, friends who wore fedoras and sun- glasses lighting Bunsen burners in the Chemistry lab, and friends who blocked their es- tranged fathers on MSN.
In the last year of high school, we watched as the fast-talking Machiavellians from Pre-Med Club and the Naturally-Occurring Fractals Society got snatched up by all Ivy League univer- sities, and though we were jealous, we still had the summer, we still had music, and maybe, for some of us, the rest of our lives, to iron out our wrinkled self-esteem.
I learned then that we were not content. We were not content with test scores, parental expectations, the pathetic length of our vacations, and the fact that people were getting together and severing each other faster than you can turn pages in a book. Most of all, we were not content with who we were.
In the last year of high school, we watched as Nikolay rotated through so many girlfriends that he developed his own gravitational orbit. I remember eating lunches in the makeshift IKEA living room some helpful vagabond had set up in the ravine behind the school. We ditched prom to light firecrackers along the lakeshore. Smoke obfuscated our faces but there was something truthful in our gathering under a black cryptogram sky.
In the last year of high school, we found out that despite stern reminders from our teachers, the Science Olympiad That Will Decide Our Futures did not in fact decide our futures. And though we promised we’d write one another and visit each others’ universities, our friend- ships all deflated like hosed down pop-up books anyway.
I used to think we were nocturnal creatures that couldn’t sit still. Finding no comfort in words. Becoming stranger each day with cold palms and a lobotomized head, spinning off- center. Alone. Thinking that the best years of my life were the high school years, and that everything I could ever offer to anybody was already c-sectioned and pie-charted, and sliced and pre-packaged and rationed out.
That was how I imagined it, anyway.
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Millie ho