The First Day

Sure, the backpack smelled of freshly minted polyester.
Its pockets precisely organized with pens and newly sharpened pencils.
The notebooks full of blank pages full of potential.
The clothes, the shoes, the hair — the cleanest they would be all year.

I hated the first day of school.
The backpack overpriced and waiting for the first of many rips.
The pens find a way into an abyss, while the pencils become as dull as the classes.
Pages of a notebook become filled with only drawings.
Pant cuffs torn, shoes scuffed, hair unwieldy after the longest first week of your life.

Never did I feel more nervous to learn of my new instructors, the classrooms I couldn’t find,
the awkward lunch table because of the friends I left behind last year.

Last year was always easier, except for the first day.
Always anything but normal.
A terrible indicator of how the year would play out,
but you’re never quite sure until it does.

Instead, you finish the longest day of your life, another year in a row.
But you quickly realize it’s because it’s the first time on this road,
and each day after shrinks in time,
as does the anxiety that prevails on the first day.

The first day, I hated the the first day.
But it was just one day, every first day.