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FEATURES // THE LASALLIAN RHEIMS
mosaic MARIELLE NAVARRO
PHOTO SOURCE | SAILEE VILLANUEVA, TONI REMOTIGUE
John. Lasalle. I say those two names as if they form some personal portrait; isolated and kept from a whole different world other than the muse itself. Unfortunately, that is the exact destiny that arrived for the two Grade 10 sections of the Academy of St. John, us being barred from an experience that we can only ever dream about. The pandemic has been hard for every single student in the world. There was a sudden need to adjust to a “new normal” even if it wasn’t even remotely close to feeling like the norm. 10th grade has always been something people older than us talk about, and it is also commonly depicted in mainstream media. I may not speak for everyone, but as a 10th grade student who had this vision of what should be happening at this point in our lives, nothing is what I had ever imagined it to be. I’m not close with most of my classmates and if I were honest, I don’t think that we would be even without the COVID-19 barrier between us. That’s alright, it’s a normal thing that happens in most teenagers’ lives. We find our people, and some of our peers just aren’t meant to be with us. I find myself thinking that our connections as a batch have truly been fractured by the time we spent apart.
This isn’t like a broken bone that can heal with time, because being in the 10th grade means that we are going towards the path of an inevitable crossroads. We don’t have the time to heal this divide, but even division can be beautiful in its own way. This is less of a limb and more of a piece of broken stone, glass, and ceramic; a mosaic. It isn’t all fun and color, especially because we all yearn for something complete and whole that can be immortalized like the others. We missed many things like proms, retreats, field trips, and parties, and the fact that we survived shouldn’t invalidate the fact that we are humans who long for what we cannot have. Our brokenness turned into something beautiful and unique, unlike every other story we’ve heard about. In a long hallway full of art pieces that were created with precision and unexplainable familiarity, the spot that should’ve been ours will have a blank space that we just can’t fill. Generations will ask what happened to the batch that was hit by a horrid tide of change and difficulty, but at least we know in our distant souls what happened. Because we have our personal portrait – our mosaic – built from the fractures we shed propped up on our hearts where only us can truly see and feel. [R]
