I don’t care how foolish & silly I may sound during this story of mine, because what I accidentally threw away, was the most valuable thing I had ever owned.
In my senior year of high school I took anatomy & physiology. I sat in the back row of tables with two very close friends. I began that class with an empty 3” black, 3-ring binder. By the time I graduated, that binder was so full, it didn’t close properly.
It didn’t just contain my notes from lectures, hand-outs, homework, tests/quizzes/midterm/final, (all of which, my lowest grade was about 90.. I aced my final, thank you very much). This binder held onto every note that was scribbled into the margins from either one of my friends. It held onto every tic-tac-toe game between us three. It held every hangman game, stupid, but funny doodle, one liner jokes, smiley faces, hearts, changed phone numbers, scribbles of gossip about the teacher & other students. In the pockets, it held onto a prize we found in our morning cereal. It held onto a hemp necklace I would never wear. On the cover, slid into the plastic covering, was a drawing all three of us worked on. It was funny, dealt with anatomy & wildly inappropriate. We all loved it. This is just a hint of what was in that binder. It would take me 2 hours a day, 3 days a week, for a school year to tell you everything that was in that binder.
The binder was a time capsule of the greatest time of my 4 years in high school. Years after I graduated, I would flip through it & see if I could still pass that pop quiz. Or see where I went wrong on that last tic-tac-toe game. One time, I was flipping through it & discovered a little scribble of a note that I had never noticed before.
About 2 years ago, I was spring cleaning & found a very large rubbermaid container bin. I opened it up & found all my high school stuff. My binders from each class & old text books I forgot to return. I threw out the chemistry binder & the trigonometry binder. I flipped through the world history binder & that wasn’t worth saving either. I had a trash bag that it was all going in. At the end of the day, the trash had been taken out & I put everything away.
A week or so later, I went to get the binder & I couldn’t find it. I seriously panicked. I emptied every container. I dumped out every drawer. I checked in the attic. I checked the basement. It was gone. I searched for 2 days, before I accepted the fact that my anatomy binder was never to be seen again. I wanted to cry. I was so upset & angry. Every spring cleaning I feel like it will just appear out of nowhere, from a box that I had never thought to check. It never does.
What really aches my heart about this loss, is that I wanted to bring this binder with me to my 10 year high school reunion. My friends knew I kept the binder & they said ‘never lose that thing’. It was more of a joke, in reference to how epic it was in scale to other class related binders. I was looking forward to seeing their reactions at the reunion. I was looking forward to sitting down, in the back row of our anatomy class room & going through every page of that epic scrapbook of our senior year.
Even without the binder, we will still sit in the back row. Check to make sure our names are still carved into the wooden legs of the table. We will look to see if that tiny sticker of a baby chicken is still stuck to the ceiling. And we will never forget the memories of being the three class clowns who, despite all our lecture interruptions, the teachers glares & other students scoffs. We three still had the best grades in the class.
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Composing members:
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