(Prom Queen)
I'll Never Be Prom Queen
Some seem to view life as a popularity contest, as if high school never truly ended. The ups and downs, the highs and lows; life never seems quite as simple as those four years walking in the most hallowed halls of hell. You never regain the innocence and freedom of those years, unshackled to responsibilities of adulthood. After high school, there’s the duty of getting through college in order to work a nine-to-five job and make money to pay the bills so you have somewhere to live and a car to drive to the job to make money at to pay the bills. Adulthood becomes a cycle of monotony and obligation broken by an announcement of a new baby or an engagement from people who feel like strangers though they were once your friends. From home in the morning to drop the kids off at school to working and understaffed job and being underappreciated for it to picking the kids up to home to making dinner for a family that your rarely see because you must go back to work, the cycle seems endless. Jolted by the addition of team sports you never expected your own spawn to want to be involved in. Your youth ended the moment you tossed that graduation cap.
When years later you return to those dreaded halls, long since graduated and grown, all those faces that were there with you then and those names you never knew have returned. Those people that filled the desks surrounding you in their own ocean even though they barely ever glanced your way are achingly familiar as though they were a scene from a dream or a haunting nightmare that once was reoccurring. That one got fat, the quarterback got in a skiing accident and has been paralyzed for almost a decade but he runs a handicapable gym now, she had a facial surgery but we don’t know if it’s rhinoplasty or Botox, he tried to kill himself last Christmas, they’re getting divorced, she’s got three kids from three different fathers, he’s cheating on her with the nanny, we always knew she’d eventually come out as a lesbian, he married the prom queen but she left him when she decided she couldn’t take any more of this town.
The smell of the old gym never quite changes. Sweat, paint, and a desperation to be far away and old enough to determine what you were doing and when and whom with. Even after ten years away there is a foreboding feeling hanging in the air of a high school gymnasium. People either remember you or you’re just a face in a crowd but they have no idea who you are or were. The guy who bullied you for ten years is still attractive, and a jackass. The prom queen is still the most beautiful girl in your graduating class. The valedictorian is still a nerdy overachieving goody-two-shoes. The emo kids are still wearing black. The band geeks are clustered around each other exclaiming how good it is to see everyone. The drama kids are trying to start an improv game. The cheerleaders are checking their faces in compact mirrors. The football players are smacking each other on the back and self-felicitating on doing better than their once brethren when in actuality they’re all stuck in the same hell. I’m still sitting at a quiet corner table playing my own music through headphones from my phone.
As I sit in the high school gymnasium “celebrating” the ten year span that has passed since the funeral of our youth and staring at the faces and names that surrounded me for four years I can’t help but think that I want to go back. There are new ideas, new ways to mess up, new adventures I want to attempt to have. I have this unyielding desire to do the things I didn’t in high school. Feel the cold rush of air from the metal bleachers over a football field under those annoyingly bright flood lights and inhale the scent of stale nachos while the self-felicitating football players throw a ball at each other and throw each other to the ground. Warm my fingers over the blazing bonfire of homecoming week while the narcissistic cheerleaders clap their hands and lead the masses in the school fight song. Join a club that means nothing but will look good on a college application that I undoubtedly will apply for instead of going to community college. Dress up like an idiot for spirit weeks and participate in all the events from the pep rally to the powder puff game to the dance. Sign up to be a yearbook editor just to sneak things into it that no one else will notice like curse words and inappropriate animations and innuendo. Go to high school dances; and enjoy them instead of finding a quite table in the corner and putting my own music on from my iPod. Run for Homecoming Court, holding my head high as I walk through the halls decorated in bright, glittery posters bearing my name. Hold the pointless office of Student Body President and have no real power except coming up with dance themes. Get crowned the prom queen where years later I would still be the prettiest girl in our graduating class and remembered by every fool in the fallow school gym.
But as the music comes on and the lights dim even further in this desperation scented hell and the prom queen dances with her ex-husband for “old times sake” I begin to gather my belongings. It’s time to return to the endless cycle of obligation and monotony that is adulthood. I’ve spent the appropriate amount of time commiserating adulthood with those I knew, or didn’t, ten years ago. Sweeping out of the doors and into the night with a hardly a backwards glance at the once queen and king of the hell most people call high school I realize, that’s not me.
I’ll never be prom queen.
When years later you return to those dreaded halls, long since graduated and grown, all those faces that were there with you then and those names you never knew have returned. Those people that filled the desks surrounding you in their own ocean even though they barely ever glanced your way are achingly familiar as though they were a scene from a dream or a haunting nightmare that once was reoccurring. That one got fat, the quarterback got in a skiing accident and has been paralyzed for almost a decade but he runs a handicapable gym now, she had a facial surgery but we don’t know if it’s rhinoplasty or Botox, he tried to kill himself last Christmas, they’re getting divorced, she’s got three kids from three different fathers, he’s cheating on her with the nanny, we always knew she’d eventually come out as a lesbian, he married the prom queen but she left him when she decided she couldn’t take any more of this town.
The smell of the old gym never quite changes. Sweat, paint, and a desperation to be far away and old enough to determine what you were doing and when and whom with. Even after ten years away there is a foreboding feeling hanging in the air of a high school gymnasium. People either remember you or you’re just a face in a crowd but they have no idea who you are or were. The guy who bullied you for ten years is still attractive, and a jackass. The prom queen is still the most beautiful girl in your graduating class. The valedictorian is still a nerdy overachieving goody-two-shoes. The emo kids are still wearing black. The band geeks are clustered around each other exclaiming how good it is to see everyone. The drama kids are trying to start an improv game. The cheerleaders are checking their faces in compact mirrors. The football players are smacking each other on the back and self-felicitating on doing better than their once brethren when in actuality they’re all stuck in the same hell. I’m still sitting at a quiet corner table playing my own music through headphones from my phone.
As I sit in the high school gymnasium “celebrating” the ten year span that has passed since the funeral of our youth and staring at the faces and names that surrounded me for four years I can’t help but think that I want to go back. There are new ideas, new ways to mess up, new adventures I want to attempt to have. I have this unyielding desire to do the things I didn’t in high school. Feel the cold rush of air from the metal bleachers over a football field under those annoyingly bright flood lights and inhale the scent of stale nachos while the self-felicitating football players throw a ball at each other and throw each other to the ground. Warm my fingers over the blazing bonfire of homecoming week while the narcissistic cheerleaders clap their hands and lead the masses in the school fight song. Join a club that means nothing but will look good on a college application that I undoubtedly will apply for instead of going to community college. Dress up like an idiot for spirit weeks and participate in all the events from the pep rally to the powder puff game to the dance. Sign up to be a yearbook editor just to sneak things into it that no one else will notice like curse words and inappropriate animations and innuendo. Go to high school dances; and enjoy them instead of finding a quite table in the corner and putting my own music on from my iPod. Run for Homecoming Court, holding my head high as I walk through the halls decorated in bright, glittery posters bearing my name. Hold the pointless office of Student Body President and have no real power except coming up with dance themes. Get crowned the prom queen where years later I would still be the prettiest girl in our graduating class and remembered by every fool in the fallow school gym.
But as the music comes on and the lights dim even further in this desperation scented hell and the prom queen dances with her ex-husband for “old times sake” I begin to gather my belongings. It’s time to return to the endless cycle of obligation and monotony that is adulthood. I’ve spent the appropriate amount of time commiserating adulthood with those I knew, or didn’t, ten years ago. Sweeping out of the doors and into the night with a hardly a backwards glance at the once queen and king of the hell most people call high school I realize, that’s not me.
I’ll never be prom queen.