Sunlight Always Comes

I woke up this morning to a world that was just becoming light. My first thought was that I could go back to sleep and take the SAT II on a later date. My second thought, when I walked out into my living room and the cold air of the swamp cooler pressed against my bare legs, was that this was the way that mornings felt in summer.

It was summer. There were cherries on the trees outside. The grass was soft and warm. The world was already transitioning from halfway illuminated to bright and full, and here I was. Standing in the living room. Eyes half-open. Getting ready to take the SAT II.

I think that my values have changed in the past year. I have gained a better understanding of the life that I want to seek for myself. I know that I want to waste as few hours as possible staring at SAT prep books and that I want to go to a college that places emphasis on learning, rather than prestige or status or achievements that lack real meaning for the achiever.

And yet.

I was scared out of my mind this morning.

I was scared when I pulled my clothes from the dryer and got dressed. I was scared when I placed two Clif bars, a handful of mints, three #2 pencils, my wallet, and my admission ticket into my purse. I was scared on the ride across town to the testing center, and I was scared standing in the too-hot sunlight out of the too-big building with too many nervous kids. I was scared sitting in the library waiting for the test to begin and watching my friend Sophia through the library's glass windows as she waited to be led to her testing room. I was scared staring at her orange backpack and her bottle of water, wishing that I had brought a bottle of water, too.

More than anything, what I wanted was to walk downstairs to the school's dark basement and run around it ten times. I wanted this really badly, in the same way that I wanted to take off my long-sleeved undershirt, which was about to give me a heat stroke. I wanted to take it off and step outside in my tank top and never turn back.

But I didn't do this.

I took the Literature SAT II. It is composed of several passages, each accompanied by a set of questions. Some of the passages were so beautiful. One of the poems was the kind that I would have read over and over again if I had been at home. I would have memorized its lines without trying, held it to my chest as if the rhythm of the lines and the fullness of the words could seep into the core of me.

This poem was one of the last on the test. By then, a few of the students next to me had finished their tests and were staring at the ceiling or rolling their pencils forward on their desks and catching them before they fell off. I finished the last set of questions and flipped back through the test to answer a few questions that I had left blank. Then, just before time was called, I re-erased a few erase marks.

That was it.

My shoulders loosened, and my fingers relaxed. We had one more section to fill out before we could leave: a statement to be copied in cursive and then signed. It took one boy ten minutes to copy the statement in cursive because he was so used to manuscript. I watched as he stared at his paper too closely, his fingers tensing, trying to get the letters right. When he looked up and saw that he was the last person, he addressed the whole room with a loud "sorry." We all laughed. It didn't seem to matter now. What did cursive writing or minutes on a clock matter when compared with a crazily important sixty-minute test designed to prove one's encompassing knowledge of a standard high school subject?

What, in truth, did life matter when compared with a crazily important sixty-minute test designed to prove one's encompassing knowledge of a standard high school subject?

The answer, of course, is that life matters more. Snow and red dresses and music and the outdoors matter more. Cherry trees and soft warm grass and early mornings spent in bed matter more.

We walked through the library's glass doors and escaped into the world outside.

(Image one here. Image two by Escape Photography.)