Letter from the Online Editor

Hello, Wake Readers. Care to mourn with me?

I may be 22, but, admittedly, I spend a lot of time thinking about my impending death. How can I not? As the clock ticks away during class lecture, or as night falls while I scrub tabletops at work,  I can’t help but feel like I’m being thrown headlong through the passage of time and right into my shallow grave. And it’s not because I’m plagued with some mysterious ailment (although that would be easier to explain to my friends and family); instead, these recurring thoughts of doom are thanks to the wrapping up of my college years. 

A lot of people are probably in the same boat as me: about to be coughed out by the public school system, forcibly ejected from the only world we’ve ever known. And then what? I’m a graduating senior— which means to the younger folk, I’m as good as dead. 

But this is okay. Life moves fast, and we are all at the mercy of its whiplash. Instead, let’s momentarily shove these nihilistic thoughts aside and reflect on all the years gone by. Particularly, our heydays, our pinnacles, our peaks: middle school. 

It was a simpler time, although we were too wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of our own adolescence to realize. It was an era of squished peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and colorful aeropostale shirts; an era of braces gleaming under fluorescents and sticky lipgloss smeared around mouths. We were scared, we were eager. We were unknowingly awash with all the possibilities of our youth. The future was too far away for us to comprehend, but now it’s glaringly here, just as it always will be. 

Don’t get me wrong, middle school was awkward, every single part of it. You couldn’t pay me to slip back into my bedazzled, low-rise jeans, and listen to kids talk about who kissed who under the bleachers. But we are the sum of all our cringey childhood experiences, a person born from those locker-side encounters with our crushes, shaped by brutal dodgeball games in our ill-fitting gym clothes.

So, yes; I’m more or less being flung towards my eventual annihilation by the perpetual hands of my own internal clock. So are all of us. It’s okay to mourn the years gone by, even the bad ones. In fact, let’s celebrate the uncomfortable and embarrassing. Let’s relish in our mourning, because an existence worth missing was an existence worth living. Even when we were in middle school.

Thank you for picking up this issue of The Wake. May it momentarily slow your descent towards doom and remind you of our not-to-be-forgotten time in the early 2000’s.

Sammi Divito