Senior

Senior year.

Are you ready? they ask. As if it is ‘easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy’ to prepare for your last year of school. You’re almost an adult, and yet you find yourself wishing for nothing more than to be young enough to learn that rhyme for the first time.

Because here it is.

The last year of a routine you’ve been following since the day you were old enough to hold a pen – it’s all you’ve ever known. The last first day, the last spiralled notebooks, the last locker combinations and report cards. The last lunches in the school’s rancid cafeteria and the last scribbled notes passed across desks. The last year to feel like a child.

It’s electric. Voices ring through hallways, goosebumps layer students’ skin. Everyone knows. Teachers purse their lips together as a silent way to say: “this is it”. 

The last year that everything stays the same.

So enjoy it. Every moment. Don’t hold your breath through the homework assignments and exams. Don’t wish away the hours in a day or the days in a week. Why rush it? For the last time in your life, sit in a four-walled classroom and let your eyes wander over every poster plastered onto the corkboards. Listen to the teacher’s words, taste the flavour over your tongue. Allow yourself to be taught, to be led through life because you’ll soon see that there isn’t always someone to follow. Exhale the stress and inhale the finality of it all. The exhilaration.

Senior year will be everything that you make of it. Make something great – like nothing you’ve ever made before. 

This is it.