Whirlwind 10th Anniversary Edition: Longfellow's Literary Magazine for 2019-2020

Whirlwind
d
Memories
By Megan Z.
The stars were as taunting as ever. They sparkled
brightly tonight, as if nudging me to make a wish.
Hm, ok.
I want to travel back to 7th grade.
Did it work?
I checked my surroundings.
Yeah, same old dusty room. Same old pile of stuff I
had yet to clean out.
7th grade… Just thinking of it made me sad. It was
like a ball of unexplained emotion that I had kept in the
dark. Indeed, 7th grade, cut short by a pandemic that
changed our lives. My mother always told me to forget
such sad things. I couldn’t forget 7th grade.
I sighed, sitting down, rifling through dusty essays,
cringey middle school writing, wrinkled tests, old notes
about things I learned what seemed like ages ago.
My eyes stopped at an old, battered up notebook. No,
not any notebook. Faded purple cover. Fine gold lines.
Math. It must be.
Memories flooded back to me in waves.
Suddenly I was back in that classroom. A white
board with notes on the sides. Desks in rows and rows.
The board with the week’s record of who got a perfect
skill drill. And the window, that led to outside where
the trees sparkled in the sun and the Kiss-and-ride line
stretched out below. I could hear the laughter in this
room as I remembered the jokes made here, the small
potato accusations, the lectures that I had recorded in the
notebook.
The scene faded away. That’s in the past.
Beside the notebook, a pink binder caught my eye. It
was covered in stickers, ranging from Star Wars Jedis to
mini donuts to random flags of countries. I smiled.
History.
My notes were still in this binder, perfectly intact, as
if time had never glanced at it. I flipped through them,
delving back into times of centuries ago. I could almost
hear the lectures again, as they ran through my head,
before quickly fading away. I set the binder down.
The sky outside was pitch black, save for the bright
moon in the sky. Moonlight streamed through the room,
illuminating two identical binders, both torn around the
edges.
One was filled with essays and writings, while the
other had papers of labs, lessons, and tests.
I flipped through the binder, reminiscing how I had
first used a microscope, and how I would sit, typing and
typing the whole period to finish an English assignment.
How I missed the eye-searing colors of the lab books and
the interesting packets of stories and questions I would
get.
A slightly torn piece of notebook paper was wedged
in between the two binders.
4/14/2020
9:27 PM
To my future self… Huh, you’re older now, right? I don’t
know if you’re reading this months, years, or even decades
from now, but hey, you’ve grown up, right? Are you healthy?
Are you doing ok? Have you achieved your dreams yet? I
do hope you are doing well. I am writing this currently in
a period of struggle. Everything has changed this year. The
pandemic of 2020, remember it? I hope you still remember.
It has been about a month since I’ve last gone outside. I
hope that right now you might be able to happily enjoy the
outdoors. But I won’t say too much about my dreary life
right now. I am writing this for you to remember. Do you
remember this school year? I want you to remember that
despite the sadness in this year, there were many, many
great things that happened this year. New friends from
other schools, crazy sessions after school when we would
decorate lockers for birthdays, epic chorus concerts, Model
UN conferences, Mathcounts, Math Lab, etc. I hope that you
can remember those beautiful songs you sang back in 7th
grade chorus. I hope you can remember that heartwarming
morning on your birthday when you saw your locker so
interestingly decorated. I hope you can remember that even
through dark times, you had your friends, and your twin.
We all got something from this year. I hope you can take
these memories as you grow old, until maybe this paper
fades to nothing and we all collapse into the ground. Stay
strong, older Megan!
You from the past,
Megan Zhang
Dawn found me with tears in my eyes, sitting in the
dust filled room, laughing at my naive self.
Perhaps I really did travel back in time to seventh
grade.
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