High School Does Not Remember You

Going back is hard.

It’s its own world, a universe all on its own in a hidden cloud. Brick outsides and weird yellow-white walls that echo with years of cusses, clashes, and tears. Hours of tortured minds and anguished emotions swirl down the single hallway. It’s the metallic clang of slamming sheets of ugly metal holding the knowledge of the ages deemed important enough to carry on.

And it is all these things in a single smell. A waft of some weird sensation of sweat and hormones not yet understood, of ruined books and copied paper, of forgotten lunches and lucky uniforms. Open the metal doors and get hit by the past as it rushes over you. The differences and similarities all washed together in some weird jello of a smell you can’t name hitting you from a place you spent years and have since locked away.

Now new people roam the halls, people who do not smile at you or recognize you like them from a year before or see you as someone who once owned this place as they do. You can no longer swagger down the length of the building, showing off how far you have gone because you cannot relish in going far if no one knows where you came from. You do not own this place anymore

But it still owns you. Memories you can taste, full of grit and salt and bile and sugar. Of teams and sweat and hugs and secrets. Of promises long-forgotten and still remembered. Of the doodle in the desk that you have memorized or the smooth spot on the table that still fits your thumb. After all these years, washed, scrubbed clean and locked away, the memories still find you.

Going back is hard.

It doe not remember you. But you cannot forget.