“GRADUATES”

In my last year of high school there was this weird thing that happened. All of the beautiful girls in the class discovered religion, and as they did, they pulled themselves away from the world and entered a sort of dream space, and they never seemed really ‘there’ ever again. I’m not sure if this vanishing represented corruption or purification.

In North America, high school graduation is considered the peak of one’s life on earth. Everything that follows is treated as some kind of letdown. But as far as I can remember, high school students are more like embryos than they are people. So when we glorify youth in this manner, what are we really glorifying?

When you look at somebody’s high school grad portrait, it’s as if you’re really looking at a fetal ultrasound. The person just isn’t ‘there’ yet, and by ‘there,’ I mean that their personality hasn’t been tested or formed or burnished by life’s experiences. You’re looking inside the shell of an egg, looking at some beautiful creature that’s only now becoming awake, only now becoming what it’s destined to be.