Taken from an old Chinese legend, the idea that those who will meet and interact at some point their lives are connected by an invisible red thread, tangled and twisted, and sometimes worn, but never broken.
I graduated at the top of my class in middle school; I was homeschooled until freshman year; from a class of 30 on the east coast. I live in New Forest; I live in Lake Shore; I live in New York City. An assigned group project, prep rallies, a cause. It tied us together.
We saw One Direction. We read the Bible. We read the Quran. We read tweets. We painted up and surfed the crowd. We walked. For protest. For lack of licenses. For food. We danced. In the gym. In parking lots. In dorms. Theoretically we would have met. Never would have arrived. Never would have watched. Or listened. Or cheered as we defeat South Shore. Again. But we did.
We did…and convoluted knots formed between us. With the senate race. With gay rights. With gun rights. With a shift to liberalism, capitalism, atheism. And back.
We worried about what the football team would do without Coach Meyers. We experimented with chemistry. And heartbreak. We procrastinated on reading the assigned summer reading. We shopped. At Old Orchard and rewarded ourselves with soft pretzels in the food court. At thrift stores the weekend before Spirit Week.
We wore swim caps that turned our hair into beehives. We spent hours rehearsing in the theater. We were stars on opening night. We got second in the spelling bee. Second. Not first. We didn’t get accepted to the college of our dreams, the goal that our life revolved around. All in theory.
In theory, we’ll untangle one day. But there will still be the knots along the way. One last chance. To win the homecoming game. To pull an all-nighter for that 4.0. We’ll walk these halls once more. We’ll somehow ace Mr. Blaine’s wicked English final, while can only hope to squeak a B in Physics. And we’re waking up early this Saturday because a 2132 isn’t quite good enough. We’ll go to Yale, maybe Princeton, but probably Northwestern. No definitely Stanford. We met our mentors. We met our guides. We made decisions and desserts. We’ll carry both out of the building with us. We promise each other that the C in Calculus isn’t going to keep us from a college acceptance letter. We promise each other we’ll keep in touch.
Our strings have tangled. They have woven. They have danced, tied stretched, looped, bent, curved, twisted. And now it’s time to unravel them and move forward. As we seniors prepare to depart, we take with us strings that have been strengthened with the bonds made here. We don’t know where we will be this time next year, nor what kind of person we will be. All that is certain is that we will never forget the time we spent sewing the school together with the red string of fate. I found you, and you found me. And together, we conquered the world. And then we conquered South Shore. Our strings may tangle, it may stretch, it may wear thin, but it will never break.
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