it's nice to reread.

today is june twelfth, two thousand and eleven.

exactly one year ago today, i graduated from high school.

i'm one of those odd people who absolutely adored high school. honestly. i can say that i loved high school. even though it didn't really start out that way.

i was one of those people who went to high school out of district, so i showed up my first day of high school knowing absolutely no one except for my brother. i was also one of those cool kids who packed a lunch every day. (i went through all four years without a single school lunch.) this meant i got to the cafeteria early and i had absolutely nobody to sit with. that lasted about two weeks, and it was the longest two weeks of my life.

my freshman year was awkward. i think all of our freshman years are awkward when we look back on them. but i made a lot of friends. i was freshman star of the swim team. i had a decent spot in the band. i went to football games to watch the marching band because i couldn't be in it. i had fun.

by the time i left high school, i'd had the time of my life. i'd spent four years on the swim team and my senior year as captain, i'd taken seven science classes and two separate foreign languages, i'd spent two years on the canstruction building team, i'd given the morning announcements numerous times. i spent two years in the marching band and had an absolute blast, i'd become proficient at two new instruments, and had joined the orchestra as well as the band. i'd been in the school musical and all four staff/student talent shows. i'd conquered my laureate project, worked two jazz festivals for up to thirteen hours each, got inducted into national honor society, gotten a rather prestigious writing award at the senior honors banquet, and had gone to prom three times.

i'd graduated nineteenth out of four hundred and ninety-two.

high school had been terrific.

the last month of high school, i itched to leave just like every senior did. i had a small countdown going on in my brain until the last day of school. i figured that month of may would drag by, but it was the exact opposite. may FLEW by with supersonic speed. two weeks of AP exams. then it was senior prom. then it was the senior honors banquet. then it was senior awards night. then it was my last ever orchestra concert (we played pirates of the caribbean, which is actually rather difficult on the cello). then it was my nineteenth birthday at the beginning of june, and then quite abruptly, nine days later, i was standing at the coliseum in my graduation robes, holding my graduation cap, suddenly wondering what the hell had happened.

i was one of the smart people who didn't wear heels to commencement. i knew that we would be standing on that godforsaken concrete ramp for up to an hour waiting to march in with our perfect "corners" like we'd practiced the day before. i stood across from zak and we nervously swayed back and forth, realizing that this was the absolute last time that we would all be together in one place, because nobody ever goes to all those high school class reunions.

i walked with my perfect corners. i shook my principal's hand. my mother took pictures of me being handed my diploma. once i had it, i sat down and watched as everybody else got to graduate from high school. with a high school as large as mine, there were people i had never seen before in my entire four years of high school. and i mean entire four years. i only missed one day of high school.

now i'm a sophomore in college (technically) and i've moved onto bigger and better things. i've moved onto dorms, college professors, college internships, majors and minors. i've moved onto the future. this is where my life really takes off, where i decide what i want to do for the rest of my life and how i'm going to achieve this. high school is slowly becoming a blur.

but every once in a while, i miss the swim team i captained. i miss driving to school in the dark and stopping for coffee at the gas station. i miss having a locker, i miss the periods, i miss the bells. i miss the people, i miss the teachers. i miss i miss i miss.

this is the new chapter. but every once in a while, it's nice to reread.

graduation. :)