We were ugly then. Like shoddy, half-hearted grotesques, like fever dreams. The smiles we wore were tattered and dull, worn by the four-year-long gaze of the hallway walls.
The gum we chewed crawled up our teeth, kissing gums, clinging to the roofs of mouths and folds of our lips. Our hair exploded from us, cleaved and hacked into some sort of weary semi-surrender. It had submitted, and that was enough.
Our legs slithered out of our seats. Hanging onto the backs of chairs and the edges of desks, fidgeting through space like a vibration. Where are we to put these? we thought. Where do they go?
It welled behind our eyes. The late nights, the moonlight bending through our windows and splashing across our faces, the exhaustion. The desperation and the childish angst. It all settled there, and our eyes became waterlogged with it.
Our backs curved like question marks. Our faces were carved up by blankness, by vast expanses of acne and weedy stubble. Our bodies bent and twisted, searching for some semblance of comfort, and we became gnarled in our seats. The clothes we wore were never enough to cover the entirety of us, so that ankles and wrists and lower backs were left to the elements. Every inch of exposed skin was just so many more chinks in our armor.
We were a peasant army. Poorly trained, scared shitless, compelled by some lord, some unseen higher power, to fight in a war that we did not ask for. Here were our spears, sharpened rocks lashed to sticks by mechanical pencil springs, rubber bands, and paper clips; and here were our shields, hewn out binder covers and notebook spines; and here was our armor, the tattered farm clothes, the beat up converse sneakers, the thrift store flannel that we pulled over ourselves, praying, may this protect us out here, oh God please may this protect us. We were ill-equipped for everything except failure, and, venturing onto the battlegrounds, we met the enemy, and failed bravely.
We were the enemy, of course. All of us. That was our war.
And we were caged then. The metal and plastic and faux wood of our desks knotted around us where we sat. They pressed hard palms into our backs, our sides, our crossed legs, trapping us there. Our desks were like a magician, holding his cards the way only a magician can, fingers all latticework and basket woven and moving faster than your eyes can follow, manipulating the cards like puppets, making them dance, holding them still, keeping them quiet and subdued as they whisper around the bends of his hand and the crooks of his fingers and then, poof, are gone. We were the butt end of some cruel sleight-of-hand trick.
Our thoughts sunk like embattled ships swallowed by the sea, disappearing into the hollows of the brain where all forgotten thoughts go. We were left to confront the world without them.
Our words hung between us like thick morning fog. They dribbled off our tongues as we passed one another, pooling in milky puddles at our feet. Sentences were not spoken so much as discarded. There was nothing to say, so we talked about nothing.
Pens rained from our desks, and we watched them. It wasn’t the clatter of it that killed us. It wasn’t the lost battle with gravity, the downward seduction of open air. It was the force that the pen exerted on us. That the student must forever hold fast to his pen was another law of nature, another unbreakable rule. And so we pried ourselves from our cast-iron positions, and heaved our bodies over our desks, and reached our arms out far to the floor, and caressed the pen with our fingertips, and stretched our arms farther, and found it, found that damn pen, and pulled it into our hands.
That was our gravity. That was the only gravity we truly knew.
And that was what we were, in those years. We were the bearers of it all.
All of it - all of it - was tattooed onto us then. The tattoos grayed as we aged, but they never faded.
And that was it. 
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