Tarn Wilson

Assignment For My Post-Pandemic High School Students, Who are So Very Careful

1. After school, take a bus to the end of the line. Tell no one where you are going. Wear a woolen hat and big glasses. Dodge the imaginary cameras that follow you everywhere. Bring a paper map and read it badly.
2. As the day dips toward dusk, find a creekbed with bullfrogs and get mud on the hems of your frayed jeans. Forget your date with your fear of failure.
3. Walk back alleys in weather that falls like confetti. Let your hair get wet and fingers cold.
4. Sneak through darkening streets and abandoned factories with dusty windows and metal drums filled with secrets. Be shocked by silence. Watch the shape of your own shadow in the streetlights, how it shrinks and stretches and follows you everywhere.
5. Make a plan to change your hair: be gaudy one day and mossy the next. You’re not playing yourself in the scene and owe us no consistency. Remember your ancestors–far enough back, we all have at least one brave traveler to a new land.
6. At night, make a shelter out of bottle caps and fishing line. Get paint on your hands. We’ve taught you control; now learn to unravel. Teeter. Falter. Don’t open your gratitude journal: you’re too young for that. Be open-eyed and sensing like an animal.
7. The prom dress in your backpack? Shred it. Reassemble it with wool scraps and pages from abandoned telephone books.
8. Toss the invitation to the wedding of your gradebook to your future.
9. And this: Don’t let your bitterness be petty. Not yet, not yet.
10. Many starry years from now, you’ll connect your dots, name your constellation, maybe call it fate. For now, glitter in the darkness.

https://doi.org/10.59236/tboj132