Personal Essay: The Drainpipe

Personal Essay: The Drainpipe


    For a half hour, every school day, for a few months, I was really happy. A
friend and I would go to the drainpipe, and we would sit, talk, eat our lunches,
and listen to my walkman. It was the perfect place: It was quiet, beautiful, and
it was full of peace. It didn"t matter whether it was cold or hot, somehow you
didn"t feel anything sitting on that drainpipe. You would feel the wind on your
face, and it made your face cold, but inside, you felt warm and cozy, and you
almost felt like you couldn"t be harmed. There was something magical about the
drainpipe. Maybe it was the fact that nobody was around except the two of us,
and we were tiny compared to the long grass surrounding us. Then again, it could
just been the freedom of knowing that we were listening to the walkman that was
banned from school, and we weren"t getting caught. What ever it was, it doesn"t
matter because analyzing something takes away the feeling it gives when you
think about it. It was just a great place, and it made me happy, and I don"t
know why. That makes it better in a way, just knowing that it had that power.

    Everyday, I would meet with a friend at the drain-pipe. That is until a
teacher found us and told us that because we didn"t have any adult supervision,
we couldn"t eat there anymore. It felt terrible. I wanted to stay there. I had
always thought that adult supervision was outdated by the time we were this old.
We had come to this place to get away from adults and all the other P.C. people
in this world, and now we had to join them again. At lunch time, I wander now,
using the tape player in any open classroom and get into screaming matches with
people, it"s all just little kid fun anyway. Lunchtime isn"t the same anymore. I
wish the teacher had never found us.

    Even to this day, I go to the drainpipe. When things get to hard at home,
and I need to just escape, I make the excuse that I forgot a book at school and
I leave. I cross the...