Senior Column: Miranda Gibbs

I am a name. I’m whispered down hallways, behind closed doors, written in textbooks, in the subject line of countless emails.

To most of you, I’m just a name.

To most of you, I was the girl in class who took a lot of sick days, who was still on the roster and you had no earthly idea why or how. No matter how pretentious and waxing I get (and I really do apologize in advance people), just remember this: there is nothing romantic about being sick. Forget everything you ever read in that one John Green book. I’m not anywhere near dying of cancer, but my general point is to explain how incredibly not poetic it is to lie in bed and feel like crap.

There’s doctor’s offices, and awkward small talk with nurses that your parents have yelled at on the phone just enough times that they give you a side-glance of annoyance. There’s showing up at school, and hearing shocked voices launch themselves at you with excited “you’re here!”s and “it’s a miracle”s. Then there’s the whole aspect of being sick: not eating, not sleeping, not really doing much of anything except being in state of pain-dulled state of bitterness and cynicism.

Let me just tell you this is not exactly how I thought my life would turn out. I always kind of held out hope that my life would be somewhere between the TV show “Gilmore Girls,” where everyone is witty and talks really fast, and a Woody Allen movie, where you could sit on a park bench and watch your day fold out in front of you.

But when they took away my school ID, there were no droll references that I could pull out of nowhere. On my worst days, I laid in bed in complete darkness listening to Johnny Cash, and felt sorry for myself. I pretended that the light poking through the crack in my door could illuminate another world. One with a bright side. Maybe a park bench.

Instead I got an old couch that smelled like feet, covered in a blanket of tablet printer paper, and a family that understood when I just hated people and InDesign and school; they even understood when I dropped out of school, even if they never let me live it down. Room 521 was the closest thing I ever got to a real high school experience. But it was so much more, because we got to know what it was like to do something great.

So to most of you, I’m just a name. To the ones in Room 521, I’m Randa. I yell, cuss, spill printer ink on myself, and am, more often than not, barefoot in a room that hasn’t been mopped since 1972, and I get what I need to do done. Those people are my favorite. Because of them, I think maybe it’s not the end of my story.