Here within these walls
We are taught the tools for life
To live it, survive it,
To thrive in a world full of guise.
But
See
People think that here the learning's based on grades
That books and pencils dominate our lives.
But in a world small as a spinning globe,
We learn more important things.
Lessons go untested, uncharted, unacknowledged.
Here and now
We learn what stays burned into our brains
Etched into our thoughts
Lesson's we'll never ever forget
So drilled and memorized are they.
And that is why we want to leave.
To run.
To forget.
Here we learn the unendurable lessons that our lives revolve around.
We learn to love, we learn to lose,
We learn to be used and to act to perfection.
We learn to suffer, we learn to hate, we learn to feel jealousy
And shame
And fear.
We learn that in a world as small as this
One person can turn the sky black, or blue.
One person can bruise the soul.
We learn to take our hurting seriously
No matter what small thing has dredged it up.
We learn to endure, to go on, to give up, to play dead, to play alive,
And oh, god, do we learn to wait.
For the day we might be at least an inch removed from our teachers.
For our truest teachers in high school have no degrees,
No qualifications.
The most important teachers we will ever meet
Have nothing whatsoever to do with grades.
They teach you that
You can't leave
You can't hide
You can't run
You can't try
They teach humiliation and obsession and seduction and depression.
In twenty years, when somebody asks me what I learned in high school,
I cannot be sure that the first thing I say will be
Mathscienceenglishgeographyfrench
I cannot be sure that the words won't fall from my lips
Before I can reel them back in-
Even years hence-
"In high school, I learned how to bleed."