There is a uniquely unsettling feeling in the moment of quiet one experiences while brushing one’s teeth on the eve of graduation practice. I’m done with high school. It unsettles me.

Why wouldn’t it? I’ve spent the last few years quite comfortably: I sign up for classes, I attend the classes, I have twenty-one instructional periods and two Study Hall-equivalent periods per week, I have AI Club on Mondays and Math Club on Thursdays. Or had, I guess. I went across the street to get a chicken bowl with my girlfriend for lunch three times a week, and we ate it while sitting on the cement, in the shade, a dozen meters from the train tracks, out behind the school near the staff parking lot. It was quite peaceful.

And deviating from this peace, this routine, inspires fear. Why wouldn’t it? I have to live with the feeling that I am done—that never again will I have the chance to eat a chicken bowl for lunch while sitting on the ground behind school, or attend AI Club, again. I’ll never get the chance to change my high school experience: I’ve lived it, and these are the stories about high school I’ll tell at parties, to my children, to cell mates and to strangers. It’s official: I’ll never be able to say I got drunk at a party in high school. I won’t be able to change my high school story. But for the rest of my life I’ll wonder about the things that could have been. What if I had sat to the left of my girlfriend as we leaned against the wall?^[1] What if I had been more outgoing? Gone to the Prom afterparty?

If, if, if. What if?

But there is nothing I can do. I will never sit to the left of my girlfriend as we eat a chicken bowl on the ground behind school a couple of yards from the train tracks. But what if I had? And it’s this—these questions, these nameless feelings, this cocktail of emotion—that unsettles me. Unsettling, perhaps, but something I will make peace with. Perhaps these are the last paragraphs in a story of a red-haired kid’s time in high school.

But—hopefully—they lie in one of those early chapters of a narrative yet to be written.

What follows are two short essays I wrote at the end of my junior and senior years (respectively); I’ve included them as originally written. I couldn’t find the other two that I wrote. I like looking at these—they tell a story, however disjoint it may be. You can even see me stop putting spaces around em dashes between the two essays!

2025: A Reflection
I was sitting here, in this very spot, on the last day of school last year. Today I’m sitting here and thinking of all the ways everything has changed.

One year ago, I was watching a 3Blue1Brown video on linear algebra (which I planned to take over the summer) and eating a chicken-and-rice bowl while waiting for my girl friend (note the space) to finish hanging out with her friends. Today I’m waiting for her, my girlfriend, to finish hanging out with her friends while eating a chicken-and-rice bowl and writing what seems (to me, at least) a necessary statement to feed my ego and collect my thoughts.

You see, this time, my arm is sore. I just went my school district’s office to drop off my tuberculosis test (which is the reason my arm is sore) so that I could work at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center — which, last year, I didn’t even think was possible for a high schooler to do. But last year, I was on a World Championship-level robotics team doing what I loved: writing code.

Muse has come on: they tell me, don’t waste your time—or time will waste you.

So… I’m employed now. I’m waiting for my girlfriend. I’m thinking about how I’m going to change the world. But, most importantly, I’m thinking about the hope I feel when I remember the three digits in my bank account: $0.00. This is where everything begins.

2026: A Reflection. The Sequel
There is work yet to do.

I have no classes left in high school. The only assignment I have is a short story that I want to expand on (it’s already been submitted)^[2] and a request from a chemistry teacher to live my life, not anyone else’s. I can do that. Last year, I wrote that I was employed, waiting for my girlfriend, and thinking about how I’m going to change the world. I wrote about my bank account—$0.00—and how that is where it all begins.

This year is different but still the same: I am unemployed now—I left my job at Lockheed Martin—and I’m looking at the future, like I tend to do, and feel so, so small in the face of the world’s turmoil. What can I change, really?

For a school year typically marked by college applications and being drunk at late-night parties, I feel… strange. I didn’t put too much effort into my college applications—I wrote my entire University of California application in 18 hours on about 2 hours of sleep (due to a flight from Japan and a case of at most mild procrastination). And I’m going to UC Berkeley for Applied Mathematics. With my girlfriend! I’m still sitting here, waiting, the same way I’ve done for the last three years. It’s a beautiful, small world with beautiful symmetries. We’ll both be studying Applied Mathematics in UC Berkeley’s Class of 2030, at the best school in the world. (I might be biased.)

And my bank account no longer reads $0.00. I’ve been paid for work at Lockheed, freelance projects in both web development and photography, and—the coolest one—for winning a hackathon with my frens. Brendan and Jerry—you guys are the best. We’ve got a lot more to win. I’m working on a startup with someone I met at Berkeley’s Skydeck, and we’re going to be billionaires. That $0.00 really is where it all began.

I watched movies and started writing creatively—All You Need (about AI relationships), Burn Later (about the Just-World Hypothesis and a broken narrator), This The High Life (my favorite, about sentience and the cost of progress), and now Blanknot (a no-dialogue short story where everybody’s changing)—because I found joy in it. I’m excited to keep doing it.

I list these things because I want to savour this feeling, roll it around in my mouth and feel it dissolve before the swallow, and I wish I could feel it forever. I know I won’t—all good things come to an end—but I’m so grateful for where I am. Twelfth grade. The me writing this is unrecognizable from the me in freshman year (in love with computers, shunning humans), or tenth-grade me (in love, complicated, feeling behind), or eleventh-grade me (in love, not complicated; learning math like a nerd). I’m drunk on the prospects of the future, giddy just thinking about all the things I’m going to change about myself and the world around me. I can’t wait for it, but I wait for it with a sense of inevitability.

It is coming, and I will make the most of it. In high school, I made mistakes, mistakes made me, I learned and I grew. I regret nothing and I wish I could do it again.

I can’t, though, I know. Here’s to a new chapter, to new people; to new challenges and new mistakes; to a new me and a new you. I will live my life and nobody else’s, I will write and code and do photography.

The story continues.