Echoes of the Naïveté

Noise, racket, ruckus and the screams of hair-pulling. Rubber soles squeaking on the rubber floors. A few fights happening on the school yard. And here you are, sitting in the classroom. You are not in the mood to run around today, to fight and play games, to pull pranks on girls or go to the cantina or to the school shop to buy candies. You don't want to brag to your friends about how cool your older brother is and you don't want to hear their bragging either. Today you just want to be alone, and so when the clanking ringing of the school bell breaks the mortifyingly long class and all the kids jump from the chairs and rush to the yard as fast as they can, you stay here. You stay here all alone. It's weird how places that you are used to being full seem so different when they are empty. You can hear all the noise from the hall and the yard through the window. Not here, though. Here it is peacefully calm, chairs and desks messy just as they were one minute ago, but everything else is different. You take a deep breath and you feel the classroom. Empty and silent, but still energized and vibrant from the joy of all the children doing their best to do their worst here every single day. In school, time wilfully changes pace based on what hour it is just as if it was alive itself. Classes last eternities while breaks fly by as quickly as a mild summer breeze. It's almost like a law of physics or something. But now it is different, the time does not sprint. It's still the break but the clock is slow, and you are realizing that you have probably never been in this room alone before. In your state of peacefulness you soak up the atmosphere of this room. You feel the golden sun rays on your skin and you feel like the room could talk. This all will once end, you and your classmates and friends will grow up and have their own journeys in their new schools, meet their new friends, live their new lives. And all that will remain is going to be the imprint of your child souls in this classroom. Safely stored in the posters on the walls and the tags on the desks or the doodles on the blackboard. Opposing the merciless passage of time and all of you growing up, this classroom will stay in the back of your minds forever, labeled as “the best times of your lives”.