Thursday, June 7, 2012

Goodbye Class of 2012


Graduation for the graduates of my high school was earlier this week. I'm proud of myself for how well I've been doing. Freshman year, I pretty much started crying at the beginning of May and didn't stop until halfway through June. I think it was mainly because I saw graduation as my senior friends leaving forever, and most of my friends were seniors. A few of them stuck around for a while, and a good amount still pop up now and then. Then last year, I cried a lot randomly throughout May, and then sobbed through the second half of graduation until I fell asleep, and then didn't really cry about it until band camp rolled around and I realized how many of the important people in band were no longer there. I see one of my friends from class of 2011 almost as much as I did when we went to school together. And this year I only cried for a few minutes at graduation, which I'll get to in a bit. 

The last week of senior classes was equal parts difficult and nice. I tried not to think about having to go to Telecom and not sit next to Mackay or not being able to meet up with Matt and Alex in the morning. Mackay paid me more attention than usual. He dragged me to lunch with him several days, which terrified me (because of the cafeteria) and pleased me (because I got to spend time with him). Since I didn't have a yearbook, I asked him to write or draw something on the back cover of the notebook I use for everything. He wrote "It's not like us seniors are disappearing, Delaney. Look at George ******. THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY GEORGE ******. GEORGE ****** KNOWS ALL. -**** Mackay." He's still been texting me and messaging me on Facebook, and we're even going to see Prometheus at midnight tonight. Hopefully. I'm old enough to go, but I don't have a driver's license to prove it, so... He says that if they won't let me in, we'll go find someplace still open to spend the money that we would have used on tickets, which surprised me. He's the one who wants to go see this movie (I'm just going because it sounds okay, it gets me out of the house, and my mom shocked me by saying yes to it). 

So about how I cried at graduation. There's this guy who was always hanging out in the library. His name is Dustin. He's more of Alex, Matt, and Moxi's friend than mine, but I still call him my friend and stick up for him when necessary. He's in a wheelchair. If I had to guess, I'd say he has cerebral palsy just because he reminds me of a kid in a book I read who has cerebral palsy, but I really don't know. He's definitely physically disabled, but not mentally. Anyways, he's in one of those motorized wheelchairs. There was another guy in a wheelchair that graduated, and everyone cheered for him (compared to just people who knew him, like it was for everyone else). So when Dustin got a lot of cheers, I shrugged it off at first as nothing. Then people started standing up and continued cheering long enough that the person announcing the names had to stop and wait. I stood up a bit to see (it's hard to see from the floor where I was with the rest of the band) and started crying as I saw that he was walking across the stage. Granted, he was using a walker, but he was on his feet. I'm still tearing up now thinking about it. I'm so impressed by him and so proud of him and... it was just beautiful. I'm so happy I was able to see that. 

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