They say these are the best years of our lives. Of course, they also say these years are undisputedly hellish. It kind of depends on who you ask. But there is one common denominator among people who tell high schoolers what to expect from their adolescence. They’re all eons away from their own high school experiences. High school isn’t half as fun as I was promised. It also isn’t quite the purgatory I was warned it would be. But no one remember anything half as accurately as it happens. As it turns out, we are the most unreliable narrators of our own timelines. It seems counterintuitive—who can we rely on to remember our pasts, if not ourselves? No one, it seems—according to neurological research, the very act of remembering alters our recollection of events through mental reconstruction. What we remember from our lives is flexible, adaptive and very much influenced by our state of mind, both at the time of the event and at the time of the recollection. Combine that fallibility with the most romanticized time period in our lives, and all the high school’s a stage. In literature, television and film, the teen drama is a genre unto itself, in which characters come together, fall apart, occasionally murder one another but ultimately figure out who they really are. As our own high school years come to a close, it’s tempting to look for similar conclusions. We’d all like to walk away from this school with no stone unturned. For some of us, that means bucket lists and final farewells to every person and place we’ve ever loved. For others, that means leaving this town and never looking back. Whether we want a last glance or the last word, we all know how we want to remember these years. And, if these are the lens through which we look back on high school, this is how our endings will be re-written, over and over, into nostalgic extremes. But after all we’ve experienced here, closure will probably remain elusive. There are going to be loose ends. There are going to be stories that are only halfway done. There are going to be missed opportunities and misunderstandings, broken promises and botched goodbyes, unresolved arguments and unuttered declarations. There is going to be so much that we still don’t know, still can’t handle, still haven’t figured out. And that’s okay. These four years don’t have to be the best years of our lives, or the worst. They don’t have to mark the exposition, rising action, climax and resolution of some great inner conflict. They don’t have to be the years in which we find ourselves or discover our purpose. They don’t have to be anything or mean anything in particular. They’re just four years. Four years of failures and triumphs, embarrassment and pride, endings and beginnings and middles. Four years that we’ll remember just as inaccurately as the four years before and the four years after. Four years that, someday, won’t be as clear as they are now. So let’s remember that. Let’s remember that these four years that contain a million stories to laugh at, to cry over, to ultimately shape for whatever purpose suits us in the future. Let’s remember that our memories aren’t perfect and our experiences are nuanced and our narratives are still incomplete. And as best as we possibly can, let’s try to remember ourselves and each other as we are right now—imperfect, unresolved, somewhere in between. Hafsa Razi will be attending the University of Chicago in the fall. Reach her at [email protected].