To The Seniors of 2020
Remembering the experience and memories from our past 4 years
April 15, 2020
I don’t know what the right words are to explain the emotions that this quarantine has brought me. As I sit here writing this story on April Fools Day, wishing this was all one big joke, I’m going to try my best to write the way I feel about this terrible pandemic and how it has affected everyone’s lives, including mine.
This is not how I expected my senior year to go, and as I say that out loud I realize that there were a lot of things that I didn’t expect to happen in my high school career. But life has taught me that with the harsh reality of uncertainty can come the beauty of hope and strength we get to see within ourselves.
I remember leaving my eighth-grade promotion seeing my classmates surround me thinking the next four years were going to be the best years of my life. At that time, the only big change we had to worry about was wondering how we were going to adjust from going to school at 9:00 am to going to school at 7:30…to be a kid again.
I would’ve never pictured this was the way it ended, while we were all honking our horns in the parking lot The last time we all scrambled through the halls to go off campus for lunch, and even the last time people could hang out without having to be six feet apart. — Madsion Martinez
COVID-19 has brought everyone despair and worry but for the senior class, it has brought us a terrible end to a chapter that was not ready to be over.
We will never get our senior prom and won’t even get the chance to defend our back-to-back Clash championship title. Although this brings an intense feeling of heartbreak to every senior in the class of 2020, I think there is a lot we can take away from this life-altering experience. We never know what tomorrow holds and nothing in life can be promised. It is important that we live in the present, enjoy the moment, and never take anything in life for granted.
These past three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting and looking back on memories that have taken place throughout high school. I realized that no matter if I had a smile on my face or not, I was constantly surrounded by the people that I love. Through the good and the bad, the friends that I made throughout high school have been there every step of the way.
While I finish writing this story, I finally found a way to best describe all the emotions I’m currently feeling. High School is like one big roller coaster. We get on feeling nervous and excited, not knowing what’s to come, some moments we are smiling and laughing, while the other times we are going through a terrifying loop trying our best to not get sick and pass out. But as we are pushing ourselves to make it towards the end, we have our friends right next to us, laughing, maybe even crying, and holding each other tight because that’s all we can do during times of uncertainty.
I know this is not the goodbye most of us wanted, and we are moving on to a completely new chapter of our lives during a time of tragedy. We lost memories that were supposed to last us a lifetime, but we can forever hold on to the ones that have shaped us into the young adults we are becoming and take them with us through the next journey we are all about to embark on.