2 minute read
A Gradutation Speech
[A Graduation Speech by Zoey Greenwald]
I’ve seen that sunrise a thousand times before. It paints the hills of this place in gold every single morning. Sometimes it’s warm, casting color into my cold morning’s face. Sometimes it’s shrouded in fog, and sometimes it blazes as if it were the afternoon. I’ve seen that sunrise a thousand times before. It must have been a thousand times. Or a thousand and one. A thousand and two.
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I think— You do not live in a Home. A Home works its way through you. It catches your ankle on a bottom step that you always forget is there. It digs into your reserve of time and feels your reserve of hot breaths and heartbeats deplete. Its atmosphere molds around your form as you configure yourself to find space to breathe. Its scent sticks on you and your dreams take place there. The art room has big windows and there was once a mouse in its supply closet. The right wing of the theater has a garage door that was never meant to open into the cafeteria. But it does. When you believe that there is a special quality— a sanctity— to just being, that’s what makes a home. Each footstep, contributing to a sort of composite rhythm, consecrates that concrete which would otherwise be cold. Lifeless. Dead. The soles of our shoes, like heartbeats, pulse through hallways and give life to a place that could very well have had none. That’s the thing about High School, really. We chose to make it what it is. Or rather, that’s the thing about us— we chose to be who we are. We each took our passions and ran with them. Or maybe we discovered new ones. We met people who shared those passions, and we spent hours with them— giggling under our breaths in back rows of desks and staking out for booths at In-N-Out and complaining about there being nothing in SCV but the Westfield mall in the Westfield mall. In this controlled environment, we’ve proven ourselves to be anything but controlled. We are rich; complex; human. Together, we are unlike what the world has seen or has yet to see. Class of 2019— think about that: Class of 2019. Some of us have known eachother since Kindergarten. We’ve watched each other grow in ways that nobody else has. We’ve changed and discovered; taken off sprinting and doubled back.
