For most people, they would say middle school was the worst part of their lives, all of the gossip, rumors, fake friends, the glow downs, etc. My former classmates at the Emerson School hated their middle school experience, but I beg to differ. It was the time of experimenting and the awkward transition from childhood to the teenage phase of our lives. Middle school had its ups and downs and one of the worst moments of my life ended up being the greatest. 

In 8th grade, my final year of middle school there’s this tension in the air, waiting for a sigh of relief. Everyone was waiting for this year of school to be over. Many just wanted to leave this terrible school already. It’s April of 2018, meaning New York State Exams were about to hit us, and prom and graduation were just around the corner in six to eight weeks. This was the last set of three days of English and three days of Math state exams to ever take. All that was left to do was to pass them and we are home free. 

For the entirety of my middle school experience, I wasn’t very sociable and didn’t care for the opinion of my peers because I did not want to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. So, I had a limited group of friends who I had been with since the end of 6th grade. It was the day before the first English exam, and little did I know how much the next two days were going to affect me. Being that it was the day before the exam and it’s April, the moments of random rain showers came to a halt and we got to go outside for recess. Out of my small group of friends, I was the first to head outside. My friend Ryan trusted me with a Dunkin Donut box to hold while I was outside. At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal, a Dunkin donut box was just a Dunkin donut box, shouldn’t have been that big of a responsibility. 

Climbing the stairs to head to the park, I could feel the cold breeze on my cheeks that followed the shower and the misty air the rain left behind. There’s this specific side of the park’s gate my friends and I normally occupied, and being that I was the first one out, I went and sat in our area to secure it, so no one else could hang out there but us. To pass time, I was on my phone; I had a terrible android core prime that only had one gigabyte of mobile data for me to actually use, which was only enough for like five songs on YouTube. The Dunkin donut box was placed next to me, but one moment it was there and the next, it wasn’t. Some guy grabbed and ran off with it. I felt a sense of responsibility for my friend’s donut box being stolen, so obviously I chased after a guy to get it back, but I was not the fastest runner. What I didn’t know was that another guy who was in the same grade as me was chasing me because I was chasing his friend. I’m on a pursuit for this guy, racing behind him through the basketball court just to catch up to him, and as I’m running I can’t help but smile. I don’t know if it was the rush that made me excited or that I was desperate for air because I was running, but I was smiling nonetheless. The guy makes a sharp turn, barely fitting through a small entrance that separates the basketball court and the tennis court. In my attempts to do the same, I was hit with a hot feeling on my face. I soon came to realize I was no longer running, and that I had made impact with a seven inch wide metal pole and that my target was no longer running either. 

It didn’t register to me that I made an impact with a metal pole, I was more upset that I didn’t catch the thief and retrieve my friend’s goods. Like the oblivious idiot I am, I continued the hunt until a school staff stopped. Only at that moment did I grasp the situation. Suddenly ,it was hard to breathe, and my face was very hot compared to the rest of my body with the lingering taste of copper on my tongue. I pushed my tongue to feel for my teeth in the font but they were no longer there. During the impact with the pole, I had broken my nose and busted my two front teeth. Seeing the faces of my friends who had just arrived at the park, they looked horrified and pointed out the puddle and trail of blood I was leaving behind. I still didn’t register what happened so I insisted I was fine. But I was dragged to the nurses office to stop the bleeding. My feelings about what had happened in the moment changed when I saw the face of my favorite teacher Ms.Greene, as she saw me and burst into tears. I felt every muscle in my face ache and the pulsing pain of blood rushing out of my open nerves. The excruciating burning and stinging felt like my gum was sinking into lava. The bleeding did not stop for hours, I was rushed to the emergency room at Queens General hospital but they couldn’t do anything about it and by the time they saw me, dentist offices were closed. The only thing I could do was to not cry or have any pressure on my face to prevent the bleeding. 

The next day, the morning of the first English state exam, I made it to class one minute before the exam started. I had gone to a dentist office prior, who couldn’t do anything about my missing teeth and exposed nerves. Despite there being a hole in the middle of my smile, I walked into class as if nothing happened, with a big smile on my face, ready to take the exam. Upon entrance, all eyes were on me because word had gotten around about what happened along with the scene of blood that I left behind. The class erupted into laughter and so did I because I decided to take pride in my broken smile. New York City public schools do not have the greatest chairs, as in every class there is at least one broken one. Everyone was already seated, so I already knew where my seat would be. I went to my seat and lo and behold, the back support of my chair was broken in half. With all eyes on me I turned around and smiled, sharing my common characteristic with the chair’s and received another wave of laughter.

Losing half of my face should have been stressful and traumatic, especially when I needed to focus for the exams and needed my face to be ok looking for prom and graduation. While my middle school memory should have felt ruined and that I should have strongly hated the awkward transition I went through, like every other student felt. I actually appreciated that rough ending for the year and all the bumps I hit in the roads because I think students tend to always see the bad things they went through rather than reflect that, that’s who they were at the moment and they were always morphing to become a different person. My traumatic memory became an eye open to see the light in the dark and I was ok and made the best out of the worst.

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