The Best Time of My Life

“Phew!” I let out a sigh of relief as I turned the corner and entered my English classroom. Still tired from working the night before I picked the first desk I came to and put my head down in blatant disregard. The teacher, a tall specimen, slender and with a neatly trimmed haircut, came into the room and immediately announced his presence with an obnoxious “Good afternoon!” I grudgingly lifted my head and sat up. Who did this guy think he was? How dare he interrupt my moment of unconscious consciousness?

That aside his tone was rather subtle yet encouraging. Yes, yes it was a good afternoon. After all, any day six foot above ground would be better than one six foot below. Well, I’m not quite six foot, but being five foot, four inches above ground still fares well in my book. The instructor began his daily task of checking attendance. As he began going down the list of names my brain went in other directions, drowning out the age-old ritual.

Funny thing about roll call is the fact no one ever really notices whether or not a particular person is absent until they fail to announce their presence. Sure, there’s always an exception: that pretty girl who’s missing from the desk next to you, the teacher’s pet who brings the ever-so-seductive red apple each week. The brain who cries when no homework is assigned. But that kid in the back? The one who doesn’t say much or stand out in any particular way—no one notices when he or she is absent until attendance is taken. Attendance—that nice little reminder that any body with a name is somebody.

I digress. This is an essay about “The Best Time of My Life,” or at least that’s the topic the teacher began to scrawl across the blackboard, his hands dirty with a chalky residue all too familiar to teachers across the globe. “What a bland and dull topic,” I thought to myself. “How amateur. What is this? Seventh grade?”

But it wouldn’t matter what I thought.

“The Best Time of [Your] Life.” That was the topic assigned to the class and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I suppose most people wouldn’t have any qualms over a topic such as this. I’m sure most people have an abundance of memories with family and friends to make for very interesting papers. Not me.

Class was soon dismissed and I found myself in math class doing English assignments because the arithmetic was too easy to retain my attention for any length of time. Math, too, was soon dismissed and I decided to brainstorm in my usual spot within the confines of the campus library. I soon found myself lost in a whirlwind rhapsody of Anthony Hamilton, Tupac, and Maxwell among hundreds of tracks which played through my ear buds. It was then, right there in front of everyone, and yet no one at all, that I found my campground of solace--my place within a place. That zone in which, while you may very well be surrounded by dozens of people you are--at the very core of your being and with every fiber of your person--isolated from the entire universe. There is no one and no thing which could possibly pull you back to reality. You are it—you are everything in a world of nothing.

I began to think about all the different things I had experienced thus far in my life trying desperately to not take into consideration the gross number of things which I had yet to partake of. Would I write about the family vacation to Disney World when I was nine? Or how about the trip I took to Ocracoke Island with my great grandmother when I was seven? Perhaps the time I went to King’s Dominion with my mother and rode the Scooby Doo rollercoaster at five. All that remained were vague memories of flowing, golden yellow ballroom gowns, some cracked seashells, and my mother swearing she would never ride another rollercoaster so long as she lived.

So that brings me to the present.

I am now writing this as I sit here with not only one, but both butt cheeks numbingly stuck to this chair wondering how much battery life is left on my music player and how much lead remains in my pencil. “I think I got it,” I just thought to myself, feeling a bit like Archimedes must have when he discovered buoyancy (the main difference being he was naked in a bathtub and I am not). So you were hoping to read an essay about “The Best Time of My Life”? Well, considering everything I wrote I would have to say you’re holding it in your hands and just finished reading all about it.