Dear Future Seniors,

I’m leaving in a week, graduating from the school, the culture, and the people that I have spent years surrounded by. It is with great sadness and excitement that I prepare to leave, and seemingly without my consent, nostalgia has worked its way into my psyche with great fervor, and I find myself reminiscing about the oddest of things. Who knew, for example, that I would look back on the sunny days spent on the football field during PE with great fondness, or that the crowded CHS hallways would leave me with a sense of comfort and community, even as I am spending my last days here?

There is something to be said about being a Senior and feeling reminiscent about things that did not matter to me up until the last few months. Nostalgia has a tendency to make one’s past seem glossy and crisp, and I find that looking back on my past at CHS has a tendency to get stuck on the fantastic, and that the everydayness tends to get washed away between moments of greatness. In-between Mr. Davis singing at Pep Rallies and the lights going out during neon night on the football field, there are the moments in class, or in the cafeteria, where nothing and everything happened. We have a shared experience, you and I, to some degree, and being students at CHS at this point in time, it’s like most schools in the U.S., but in some strange way, it is also irrevocably ours. We have a tiny little culture here, a series of stories and jokes that no one but us will understand. So really, at the end of the day, it is not just a building, or a people, that we are leaving, but a built-in understanding.

I’m not writing this letter to tell you about this, however. You probably already know what I mean, at least on some subconscious level. I’m writing this, exclusively, so to remind you, the future Senior class, to remember. Take note of what’s happening right now, the quiet moments in the library, the loud ones with your friends, and remember. This is an important time in your life, not the most important, but of some significance, and at the end of the day, there is no one here to remember it but us.

Sincerely,

Megan Horner

Class of 2019