Daily writing prompt

Describe something you learned in high school.

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When I was in high school, I wasn’t very popular. It had gotten better from the constant harassment I had gotten in previous grades, but I was not the student with a boyfriend ever.

It was my junior year, and of course when prom came around, I didn’t have a date. In physics class, the girls who had dates for prom were chattering non-stop about who they were going with. I knew the purpose was to show off their popularity, but it still brought me down.

Our teacher for physics was Mr. Miller, and he talked about more than physics in his class. He would impart nuggets of wisdom, calling them “Miller’s Unsubstantiated Opinion”. He had one for the girls in the class, which sobered them up. “Do you think you’re going to marry your prom date? Do you think you’re going to remember who you went to prom with in three years? Probably not. You’ll have gone on with your lives, gone to college. This might seem a big thing now, but it won’t be in a few years.

I don’t know if the popular girls had learned anything from that, but I did. My high school years, it turned out, were not going to be the be-all and end-all of my existence, the cornerstone of my memories. I could see how quickly the memory would fade. And from that moment on, the girls’ chatter didn’t bother me. This was just a moment in time, after all.