Fixing Her

Chapter XXXXIX

"Friends," Elaine starts. "Family, loved ones. We're gathered today to celebrate the last day of our high school lives, the last step before entering a whole new world. We've all had our ups and downs during the past years, and none of us can compare to the other one. We've been at our best at some points, and at our worst at other ones, and now we're here. From this day on, we are all choosing which path in life that we're gonna take. No matter what grudges we've held against each other, no matter fights, hatred and bad memories we've had with each other, today is the day that we're closing the book of our childhood lives..... This year, we've all had bad days, some more than others, some worse than others, but we've all had them, and we've all made it through them differently, and we've all learned something from them, something that school in many of our opinions, hasn't been able to teach us. I got the honor of holding the final speech for the seniors of two thousand nineteen, because I had highest grades, and some people would therefor call me the smartest girl at school, but I'm here to say that even if some would consider me the smartest girl at school, the best lessons I've learned aren't lessons school has taught me..... as many of you know, holding a speech is hard. You have to choose your words carefully not to say anything inappropriate, you have to choose a topic, write cards, correct it millions of time and put a lot of time on it. I, just as everyone else, did that, and what was hardest for me was to choose a topic that would suit all, and I ended up choosing something personal, that I am still suspicious about, but here goes nothing I guess."

I can see the nervousness she feels. I've never seen Elaine nervous, but sitting here, below the stage, with a good distance between us, I can see she's nervous clearly. "The topic I've chosen to talk about, is fighting, and I don't mean punches and kicks. I mean fighting as in not giving up. I am confident enough to say we've all been at the point when everything feels hopeless and without a solution or an escape, and.... I, was one of the people that thought that instead of facing what caused me pain, it was better and easier to distract myself from whatever that was going on that I didn't want to put up with. This year, my mindset changed. I was hurt a lot more this year than I've been in my whole life, and that's not because someone hurt me, but that's because the people I cared about were hurt, and that..... you can't keep ignoring that and distracting yourself from that, because now it isn't about you. It's about him and her and them and everyone you love. This year, I've been experiencing things I don't wish for my enemies....."

She held her speech for me once to make sure I was okay with it, which I was. Her speech is really personal, but it's beautiful, and that's why I didn't have a problem with it. It's not like anyone hasn't seen the news. "What this year, what the people of this year taught me, what the past has taught me, is that you don't win a war by stepping back. You win by fighting back, by not giving up. You win by having your army's back and letting them have yours. You win by continuously telling yourself that someday, it'll be fine, and even if you don't believe it then, you fight with all you've got so you someday can believe it. We're all human, we're all in desperate need for love, attention and comfort, and to say otherwise is a lie, a lie we've all tried telling ourselves at one point in life. We all want someone to hug us tightly and say that it'll be fine, and that only happens if we continue being there for each other. A few days ago, at prom, our own Dylan Prescott came up with the quote of the year. He said, that a hero isn't someone who saves the game, but a hero is someone who saves the players. I know that I'm not the only one who's been thinking about the meaning of that beautiful sentence, so after some thinking, I'd like to translate it; a team will win games, and lose games, but what holds the team together isn't the victories it achieves, its the connection between the players. In a team, a real team, it's much more important not to lose a player, than not to lose a game. If you lose a game, you've lost it all together, you can all comfort each other, and after that, you're motivated to play and to reach for victory again, but if you lose a player, stuff get a lot more complicated. You're lost, you don't know what to do because that player had his or her own responsibility in the team that no one else can take on, not to mention that you lose not only a player, but also the motivation to continue. That's life. It doesn't matter if we lose or win in life, as long as we've got people that will comfort us and motivate us to continue. If those people disappear, how are we gonna tell ourselves that it'll be fine? We need them. We can't be our own shoulders to lean on, we need the players of our team, and that's really important to remember. When we create relationships with people, we aren't only responsible for our own lives, we're responsible for all the lives we touch along the way. We have to keep fighting for them, because they are in that very second fighting for us. We have to lift them up so that they have the power to lift us up. A car doesn't drive with one wheel, it has four. If one wheel is punctured, the car won't work. It needs all its wheels to work in order to continue, and so do we; we need the people around us to fight, and they need us to fight in order to continue, and so what I'm asking you all, is that next time you face a difficulty, you take out your phone, you call that one person, and you say, Hey, I don't feel so good right now, do you think we can meet up and just be silent together and hug for a while?"