You’re a second-semester high school senior. You’re nearing the end of your four-year-long, tedious, treacherous high school journey. After those nights of staying up, writing in micrometers on a 3-by-5 index card, all those lunches of dodging lip sync, eventually relenting because of peer pressure, and all those weekly notes emails that never got opened, your imagination runs rampant, thinking of all the possibilities that could fill up your free time.
But then it hits you. Senioritis.
It starts small at first, right after you send in your final college application, and the new year begins. You barely notice it because you’re still busy processing the fact that you had to pay over $1,000 in application fees, but you’ve already contracted it.
A few weeks pass, and it’s still dormant. Your teachers warn you that you could get infected, but you shrug it off, saying, “Pshh, there’s no way it’ll get me!”
But then you notice. Something’s different.
One sunny day in the middle of February, your alarm goes off for school. Your usual self would have instantly sprung up and gotten out of bed, but today, your finger hits the snooze button. The exchange is quick and too natural. It’s instinctive. That morning, you walk into first period at 8:17 am, marking your first tardy of the semester.
You should’ve realized your plight after that first tardy, but it’s already too late. You’re five tardies deep into the semester, and it’s not even halfway through March. You search up symptoms of Senioritis, and it all comes together.
Symptom one: a significant drop in grades. Check. You haven’t checked your Schoology grades tab since last semester. Symptom two: chronic procrastination. Check. You’ve forgotten that free periods can be used for things other than Safeway runs downtown. Symptom three: lack of participation. Check. You find checking what’s for lunch more interesting than contributing to the Socratic seminar on how chiasmus in the poem at hand contributes to its meaning as a whole.
That’s it. You 100% have Senioritis. You’d heard of it from past seniors, but never thought anything of it. Never in a million years did you think it would be this bad. You know there’s still two months left until graduation, but it feels like you’ve reached the end of the road.
Then you think to yourself again. There’s only two months left. Only two months until you walk across the stage, holding your diploma up. Only two months until you hug your teachers goodbye. Only two months until your last summer as a carefree senior (albeit with Senioritis). Only two months left until you start a whole new chapter of your life. And you decide that despite your Senioritis, you’ll try to make the best out of your last months in high school.
