\ Cont.

You make me question how I would prefer to re-experience this life, given another chance. Would I enter childhood with the consciousness of an adulthood sewn roughly to my skin? Find some reinvigorating awareness in the least consequential of activity? Smile at the opportunity to build a fort out of stacks of insulation at a construction site? Once, we did this, sneaked into the lot next door where they were building a grocery store, stacked the paper-wrapped fiberglass bundles into houses, when the light grew dim, climbed on top and wondered at satellites trailing overhead. Each of us were raw and red when we took our baths that night, scratching our skin until it was thick with the footprint of callousness.

Or would I enter into maturity with the naive eyes of a childhood malnourished of attention? I would part my lips for that first kiss afraid of the touch, too frightened to share my displeasure, and then, realizing I was on the precipice of some grand and wondrous depth, dive into that very darkness which consumes, like a soft and heavy cloud, the few remaining sunny days of youth, the last moments before I realized normal is anything but.

More than anything, you make me question my decisions, make me aware that I rolled like a marble bound to gravity, that I curved away from the hills, that I bounced off of every solid object, that I slowed down when crossing rough terrain, when what would have been best would have been to defy earth and science at every turn. I would have dropped all my alkali metals into the lake, would have looked directly into every eclipse, would have crashed through the barriers you erected.

Once you placed a bit of potassium into a cup of water, and then lithium. And with each reaction, you mentioned that there were rarer elements that were more explosive still, until you reached the rarest, which utterly destroyed both the experiment and the experimenter. But you were wrong in that the rarest element is not one found in the earth's crust, but in the mind's eye, one I imagine both of us share in gradually decomposing amounts, and this element is regret. Not regret with conditions, which is more common than salt, but doubtless regret, the regret that even at your most stubborn you admit to holding within your realm of responsibility. Because often I have thought, "I wish I had not said or done what was said and done," but seldom have I realized the fault was entirely my own. Instead, my regret was borne of a fear of consequence. I wish I hadn't uttered those words because the violent reactions were not worth the trouble. Almost never have I admitted that the words were like caesium, and they were best left unsaid, and yet, said they were.

I cannot blame these disasters on ignorance, because every one of us remembers that teacher who knowingly created fire and explosion, the glint in his eye before he mixed the incompatible elements together, you remember that look, you can see the girl he loved and the extent to the madness it caused, the desperation he felt, the desire to deconstruct our histories, the fire that burned scars into his ability to blend among the populace, the science that warped our reasoning so, some kind of religion and vengeful deity, demanding sacrifice and damning nonconformity. It is why his Word is well known to be a proper noun, it is why his authority remains unquestioned. You fear the science teacher because you know he understands the composition of loss, and understands equally the formula for destruction. You are aware that it is entirely within his power to remove that key from around his neck, approach the one cabinet housed in dust and cobweb, the glass door that seems to have never been opened, a few tiny vials inside, you know that within the ether something lurks that is rarer still, that it is within his power to uncork those bottles, release the elements therein.

Generations of students have felt the coldness of the stools upon which you sit, realized that science was a field best left for those with nothing left to fear.