An open letter to my sophomore and senior year English teacher,
I'm still not entirely sure why your senior seminar class proved to be the point at which I took it upon myself to write down everything (really, everything; there was a lot of crap I'd forgotten, either intentionally or unintentionally, until I wrote about it). You weren't the teacher I historically had the best, most candid relationship with - that distinction must go to the theater director with whom I spent several, several extra hours of my high school career with. The composition of the class itself was nothing particularly special; I knew every kid there, but I had no great friends, no one person I felt particularly comfortable and open with. Maybe I didn't need any great friends. Maybe just having known those people for as many years as I did was enough. Many of my fellow classmates I'd known since I was 11. Maybe that's all I needed.
Visiting the old haunt is always an interesting experience, especially as my sense of self becomes more and more separate from the school. Shortly after graduation, I still felt like a student there, but inexplicably old and wizened and indomitable. That illusion fortunately shattered very quickly upon entering college. I can only imagine how insufferable one must be as a college freshman that retains all the self-assigned and misguided grandeur of a recent high school grad. When I visited Country Day this year, I was more humble and more aware of the fact that for as many years as I spent there, I no longer really belonged. It seemed to me as though the school itself, all the buildings and grass and paint and stair railings, was saying, "Of course it's always nice to see you again, but don't forget: you left and another, younger student quickly and eagerly filled your place. See, there goes one now," and right on cue comes a group of 15 year old boys looking curiously at you, wondering who the hell you are, being very aware that you're too old to be a fellow student, all of them half-upset that you're brazenly trespassing on what is now their territory, yet half-excited about seeing a real-live college girl up close. The school didn't try and push me out, but it took care to ask, in its own way, how long I'd be staying, which is the polite way of saying, "When do you leave us alone?"
What makes that discomfort worthwhile is returning to old teachers, who never share the same odd, saccharine aloofness as the school itself. As much as they enjoyed you as a student, they're delighted to see you return as a real, actual functioning person they can talk to. I come back to find the ones that really mattered, to show them how far I've progressed, but also to show them that if they peel back the new coats of varnish, their student has remained much the same. To show them that their work, the daily sculpting, stitching, melting down and reshaping they subjected us to and pushed us to do ourselves was ultimately too important to touch, and that whatever we become 1, 5, 20 years on has that original mold at its core, with new embellishments and polishes being compounded on top of everything all the time (a clumpy palimpsest, if you will). A silent tribute I pay unintentionally, simply by returning a year older.
I think the point I'm trying to come to is that we left, we let go, we continuously build ourselves into new people that our former classmates may not recognize. But we come back, and all of a sudden all of those new layers become translucent and there's that original, untouched core form, clouded over but distinctly there, like a fish you see only through the ice over the lake. So when you tell me that two years later, two years after I left, my portfolio is still the bravest and boldest writing you've ever seen, I'm not the only one that hears it. That small, perpetually unsure student, who remains just as she was without the armor of time and experience hears it too.
