I don’t think anyone expected it to be a disease.
Maybe something else, MAYBE. Like a prank gone wrong or something would cancel it, but never a disease.

This whole year has just been off. I mean we started off with the death of Kobe Bryant. He was someone who we thought as immortal, untouchable, that nothing would ever REALLY happen to him. It’s kind of corny to make this comparison but we thought of our graduation in the same way. Not in a legendary way but that no matter how bad our year was our graduation was untouchable and no one would ruin or take away that feeling, that day, our day. And then it did.

It’s hard growing up in areas like this. There was always something going on around you. If you weren’t part of the problem you knew at least one person who was. Its sad but from an early age hearing about death and even seeing it was probably normal for most of us who grew up on the north.

A lot of us could’ve ended up dead, in jail, on the wrong path, or maybe even just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

North has this weird reputation of being this bad school. Ghetto, full of gang members or young pregnant females who are better for nothing else . No matter the situation though the teachers there just always wanted the best for us and gave us hope of better days, they had our back. They knew exactly what people in those situations were going through and even if they didn’t.  They tried so hard to understand.

It hit those people the most I feel like, whether you were finally on the right path, a young mother, or just had bad rep, you graduating was what separated you from being just a statistic. You went through all the struggles to prove something and now it feels like you cant. It just makes you angry, and upset at the fact that you sat there even when you didn’t want to, so that in the end you had something a lot of people didn’t have the chance to have.

It was the one thing everyone looks forward to.

In the end, it IS about that single celebration. A lot of times you don’t want to be like everyone else but with this? Man, you want to have what everyone else has had. You wanna walk across that stage like everyone else and say I finally made it and blast those photos on social media. No matter the substitution, we just won’t ever get that back.