Mr. Freed Sucks

So today was Senior Awards Night. It was filled with lots of general "Carver Rocks!" goodness, and I won a scholarship from my elementary school that I was not aware I'd applied for. But hey--money is money. Congrats to everyone who won something. We rule.

But after the awards, Freed approached Laura and I to say "Hey, thanks for doing a bajillion drafts of that poem and getting no sleep over it and even coming to school today for no reason other than to give me that poem, but we're not using it." So now, without much explanation, Laura and I can't read what I think is our rather pretty prose poem at graduation. Mr. Freed actually made me cry. Bastard. And before he told us he gave us a hug and afterwards told us, "Hey, don't let this ruin your night. We just got it so late." Whatever. I hate him and want to see his ponytail nailed to the wall. Preferrably with his head attached. But I'm going to post our poem in here anyway. Because I'm rebellious like that.

Lessons in Breathing

On the concrete steps, giggles rise from our huddled frames. Someone mentions college, and our minds leap, ready to expand from this red brick home. We think of not coming in every morning through the one blue door that is unlocked, of no longer walking through the halls covered with paintings, of not hearing hints of opera and the beat of dance drums in other classrooms. We cannot separate the math and English we've been taught from the smell of entrees wafting through the corridors, from the pounding of hammers shaking the ground, from the buzzing of hairdryers in our ears. We have been taught in the clicks of fingers on keyboards, in black clothes lit by spotlights, in the coarseness of orange fabric beneath our legs. We cling to this sidewalk to remember how our laughs blend into a familiar rhythm of sound, of shape, of paint on canvas, deepened by the echoes of drumbeats and keyboard clicks. In this still moment, time rests.

We stand and move away from our red brick home with the long cool halls that nursed us through our youth. We learned to breathe in these structured hallways, and as they disappear behind our frames, we do not fear the inhales to come. Instead, we long for air from other breezes.

As we take in the scents of new places, we will show others how we learned to breathe, to bring into ourselves the value of parts. This swallow of air taught our own lungs to expand and release a song to make trees dance. And we will remember that it is in this moment, in this collective breath, that we each learned what it means to be whole.