Cliches are cliches for a reason, and with the monstrous ever present ending of  senior year looming over me, (as if I had ever stopped thinking about it in the past twelve years of educational prison), I can’t help but allow it to consume me and devour my sense of being and my sense of passion.  

      My passion at the beginning of my sophomore year was massive. It became a separate being.  I had so much love and fervor for everything I could do, and much like a terrible teenage romcom – we grew distant. Junior year came and left and we drifted further and further until finally my senior year they seemingly disappeared entirely and they took my will to go to school with them. They have not only sent me a breakup message over text, but they haven’t returned my calls. They’ve blocked me on Twitter and Facebook.

     It wasn’t until recently on one of my many nights spent sitting and staring at the wall wondering what I did to feel so alone and so sad that it came upon me that they could have been murdered.  It’s not like them to just leave me after burning inside me for so long.

     I did my research in the form of soul searching and I found that my Passion had also been a long time of the Public Education System and the Society in which they existed in. It was, in fact, Society that had inspired my Passion to do so much.

     When this revelation came upon me, I went deeper into investigating and it kept bringing me to the same place: the massive brick oven of a school that I had taken to living in for the past couple of years. A place that combined everything from the kids who bullied me in elementary school to friends I had found in junior high who ahd fizzled out of my life and then the odd mix of both parties with drug dealers, athletes, and chaotic neutral people sprinkled into every common core class that I had to take.

    I got out my super sleuth magnifying glass and dragged myself through the hallways going through the motions. From class to class I kept finding pieces of my Passion but they weren’t there entirely but man I knew I was so close to finding them.  It wasn’t until I had stepped out of the school for lunch that I realized that I shouldn’t have tried looking for them in one place.

    They were scattered all over the school oozing out of every crack in the outdated school infrastructure, seeping out of everything I had loved and held dear to me for so long and they whispered,“It’s not your fault.” I asked, ‘If not my fault, then whose?’

    After that last fading encounter I asked myself every day why they had to happen and why that sentence had jarred me so. This bothered me for days. Why couldn’t I enjoy the things I used to love?

   When my good and old friend the Public Education System called for the third day in a row to inform my parents that I had, yet again, missed another day, it occurred to me that at every twist and turn they had been there when my Passion was. They had been lurking just as the Senior Year is doing now. They had been poking and prodding my Passion and asking them to stay just an hour longer. Poking, and poking, and poking.

    Until finally my Passion was coerced to stay and spent. Spent on required credits. Spent on people that don’t like me that I am forced to do class projects with. On AP tests. On the Regents scholarship where they sat choking on the information they had been forced into thinking was the only way to do things. Spent on writing one more perfect college essay. On extracurriculars where the people had been stretched and spent every which way just as my Passion had. My Passion had been spent on believing in the Society of the Public Education System when they kept whispering that I had to live my entire life and have it planned by the age of 17.

  And the last words of my Passion resonated in me, “It’s not your fault.”

   And they were right. It wasn’t my fault, just as it isn’t yours, or your peers. The only thing to blame is the Public Education System. They’ve been the secret killer in this thirteen year long whodunit that year after year students have been trying to figure out.