After all, I am a big senior

"I walked through those doors with a half smile on my face. I walked in expecting to see those “big seniors” shoving through the hallways: laughing, giving each other bad times… I expected to see them taking their last year and absorbing it all. I expected them to look at me and think:“Just another lower classman.” I expected to have one or two in my classes, giving the teachers a hard time because they’re a “big senior”. I expected to see my senior friends’ faces and to make my last year with them the best that I could. I expected to have a couple more years in this place. If not that, then at least one more. I guess I expected all of the wrong things because I knew that the second I walked through those doors, I had become “a big senior”. This is it, my last year of high school, my last year of those homework assignments that I complained about every day of those four years I had been here. Give them back, please, give me back those essays… those book reports… they’ll never compare to the things I’m going to have to face in this real world that isn’t even a year away from hitting me right in the face. Let me keep my friends, please. I’ve been with some of these people since kindergarten. How can it all stop just like that? Better yet, where did it go? How did I let time slip by so fast? Give me time, just let me tell all these people… all of my friends… how much they mean to me. Let me go back to my freshman year, to tell my teachers how much I really did learn. Give me the time to tell them that what they did for not only me… but for everyone else in this place DID make an impact on our lives. Stop. Let me tell all of those people who said: “It’ll go by fast” how right they were. Slow down… just please slow down. How sad it is, to think that the first day of my last year is gone. I can’t bring back the past, but I can make the future a past that I’ll remember… for the rest of my life. After all, I am… a big senior."