Red

There's an expression; the blood we spilled was never beautiful, it was just red. The girl that died last month from cancer, in a cancerous time in our lives and world, makes me think of high school. The grey wasteland of Connecticut, the sad looks on people's faces as I tried to overcome my own discomfort with myself.

Perhaps we always come back to high school; our memories of when we were growing up prominent in who we are today. But I don't think that's true for me. I suffered too much; I had nothing to say then and I have nothing to say about it now.

When we go through high school, perhaps we are growing up. But high school is it's own battlefield, a social onslaught, the crushing realization that not only are we not getting into our dream college, but that we're never going to be who we were told we could be. We lay down our weapons, and perhaps my mistake was declaring war on myself.

This is all very nonchalant. But perhaps it is necessary to deconstruct the wounds war leaves behind.

But, I learned that I am competitive. I wanted to get into Middlebury. I never did. But I had that dream. And that passionate desire to overcome my past. My senior year of high school is only the tip of the iceberg of my last decade, but maybe the battlefield had it's small wins, too. I am better for having overcome myself as I was.