Senior Year

• Jordana Smart, Grade 12
• Poetry
• 2019

Year twelve is the definition of liminality.
Your whole life you’ve been taking steps and as you grow the distance of the steps you take grow with you.
We spend eleven years of schooling preparing ourselves for this event called senior year.
The year of firsts and lasts, the year we either live through and thrive or the year many of us just barely survive.
Year twelve would feel amazing, If it didn’t feel so terrible.
Even though it's the point we’ve longed for, the freedom we have been chasing after for half of our conscious lives,
It's scary to give up the familiarity and security of streamlined education.
Its scary to let go of something we have been taught to grip onto for dear life,
Something that has been our identity, our everyday, our normal, our comfortable scheduled routine.
To be on that threshold, between looking back on our history, (accomplishments and failures alike)
To looking towards the future, that cloudy unknown filled with hidden gifts and disasters.
It's exhilarating and terrifying to be standing on this precipice, all of us hand in hand, until we are forced to let go.