Sophomore Blues

I was nervous and stressed when I first started high school. For me there was no excitement.

To me high school meant that I was less than four years away from being kicked out of my parent's house and forced by society to get a job, live on my own, find love, and become my own person.

It terrified me.

So I went into high school, kicking and screaming. Stressing about my classes that I thought would be terribly hard with a lot of homework and stress to do what the media said freshmen were forced to do: drugs, parties, and get into relationships.

It took me getting the realest, sweetest, and most sarcastic teachers of my life to make me realize that I could do everything I had set myself up for that year. With my snarky teachers making me question my thought process, challenging me to be a better student, and my sweet teachers coaxing me to talk in class, I had a wonderful freshman year.

Until I got to the end and started to get stressed and nervous again for my sophomore year.

I was stressed, nervous, afraid, and annoyed with the idea of me not being able to keep my amazing teachers. I hadn't heard anything good about the sophomore teachers and so at the beginning of that summer I was worried about what my sophomore year would look like.

For a month I was upset until I started summer school. I hadn't failed any of my classes or anything, I just wanted to get some out of the way to open schedule up for more opportunities. So while I was taking my Summer Health class I met up with one of my old Middle School teachers and we had a little chat.

She, with her old words of wisdom, talked sense into me about going into sophomore year. She told me that I was silly to be worrying when I had passed freshmen year in advanced classes with all A's and told me that I would do perfectly fine during my sophomore year as well.

Having loved that teacher for making my most hated class, PE, fun, I hung on to her every word. But then something unexpected happened that June while I was still in summer school.

My uncle of 28 years died.

It was unexpected and it hurt me a lot, though having watched media and having read books upon death I was quite confused with my reaction to it.

This was the first time I had ever had someone close to me meet their demise. The only deaths of the family I had met before that was of old and dying relatives who I had barely known.

But this was different and while my heart ached instead of feeling sad or devastated, I felt pissed off that the fucker had decided to die. As if he had made the choice himself.

My uncle of 28 died of a heart attack. Crazy, right?

Not really...

My family has had a history of terrible hearts and body systems. Whether it be with our hearts, our reproductive systems, or with our mentality, there was always a problem somewhere. But the significance of my uncle's death was known to me once my grandfather died three months later.

The significance was something I had read on a forum website that my school's computers actually allowed access to. And the saying went like this:

"If you can't laugh at the same joke when it's told to you over and over again, why do you cry over the same thing over and over again?" - anonymous.

And so I think about how much their lives affected mine and I take away from it everything that I find necessary. All of the sayings that they gave me that I agreed with. All of their funny jokes that I had always thought were lame.

Everything that made me the person I am today, I cherish.

However, not everyone agrees with my mourning style. I don't believe in crying over spilled milk, so crying over the dead is silly to me as well.

Whenever I went back to see my grandpa's dead body splayed out like Jesus on the ground, I didn't shed a tear because in all honestly I knew my grandfather was probably happier. I knew that my grandpa was in a better place.

Away from all of the distractions and the faults my grandpa, like my uncle, had passed away and I knew that, unlike my mom, crying and snuggling up to the dead body wouldn't make either of them come back.

There was no use crying over the dead, because death was inevitable and whether I die 2 minutes from now or 40 years from now means nothing because in the end we all die and it doesn't matter how old or how young you are.

Death is natural.

Yet, I have also noticed a change in me. I have become dull. I noticed on bright and sunny afternoon staring outside that I had become... 'lifeless' for the lack of a better term.

My days had become robotic and my sleeping schedule was growing longer. I felt myself start to fade in a way that I didn't like and so I started to force myself to try and keep doing the things I had once practiced with such fervor.

Something I had shown my uncle the day before he passed was my comic that I was working on. It was a full 13 pages and my uncle said that he liked the idea, but that I could get better.

It made me so proud.

But then he died the next day and I haven't drawn since. My singing that had been going great started to flatline and turn monotone. The last time I had written something was a diary entry that I was supposed to keep filling out...

But once my uncle died, my passion for the things I loved slipped away, too.

While I am trying to get better and find the passion inside me again, I know that on the outside I am dull and moody.

So until I become my old self, I have decided to upload this: my first actual writing since my uncle died in June of 2015.

This one is for you Heath.