I’m sure most of you know about school, I’d be concerned if you had no clue what school was. I’m also sure many of you have gone through more than 8 years of school in your life. I also believe that most of you know about how school feels like a cycle, endlessly repeating, with its victims never free.

From the moment you could walk, the moment you could breathe, before you knew what was going on or what existed beyond your crib, people were teaching you things. Weird shapes, resembling ancient runes, what those strange people called “letters”, lines and circles, referred to as “numbers”, and more were to come. Everyday, you would wake up and get ready for something that, while you didn’t know at the time what it was or what it would do, would ruin the next 18 years of your life- “school”.

When May rolled around, you were blessed with a summer’s worth of breaks, and you thought it might be over. But school is a cycle, and this cycle must repeat. In August, you were forced to restart your schedule and enter the cursed building once again. This time, it felt the same, but different. The people were different, but the content was eerily similar. Perhaps around here was the time you learned that this cycle would define your life for the next couple years, learning that there are 6 grades, and at this point you would have completed 1.

Throughout years of work, you made it to 5^th grade. As the cycle repeated for its last time (or so you thought), you would instead embark on a new journey through middle school. You were blessed with more independence and more freedom, yet that came at the cost of the classes becoming much harder.

And now you stand here- maybe you’re just out of middle school or maybe the end of high school’s within sight. Maybe you’re trying to figure out what to do next. Maybe you’re trying to not think about it. No matter how you react, the truth is that school will never truly be over, as no matter how many diplomas you get, it will never make the downward spiral any less painful.

Desks, pencils, books, equations, tests. I see these images in my nightmares, and even my dreams seem polluted with the insatiable beast that is the education system. No matter how much I know, no matter how much anyone else knows, the truth that we have all come to find is that it will make no difference. A or C, short test or long test, cheats or no cheats, understanding or not, it makes not a difference. The reality is that the result is the same. We are all trapped within the walls of this cursed school, and nothing will let us out. Even when that blessed time of 2:30 hits, we are not free. Even after graduation, we are not free from school, you just get to choose your suffering instead of having it forced upon you.

The school is all we know. The school is all that exists. Everything exists in relation to the school. I’ve spent hours dreading and hours preparing, yet nothing matters. In the grand scheme of things, we are inconsequential to the school and its prisoners. But the school will never be inconsequential to us. Dread it. Run from it. The math test arrives all the same.