It was this afternoon that I was taking a nap in Joseph Maughon’s bed while Colton Davie was working on some Russian homework at his desk. All of a sudden, a piercing siren from outside disturbed my slumber.
In my sleepy head the noise sounded like a severe storm or tornado alert and my first thought was, “Man, do I really have to get out of bed and find safe shelter somewhere in this dorm?”
Then, as the siren continued to blare, my thought shifted to, “I do not want to die yet!” That was quite a dramatic thought altogether, but you have to remember that I had just woken up, so my thoughts were a little off-kilter.
Fearing for the safety of the community, I lazily lifted my view to the window outside to check two things: the speed at which people were traveling and the way in which the trees moved.
I observed two different things. My first observance was that the students on campus were not running around hectically as I had once assumed they were. In fact, most of them were moving at a leisurely jaunt, if you must know. And my latter observance being this: no trees told leafy secrets of any storm being cooked up in the air. Thus, I realized that no one was in any real danger, at least danger by tornado or severe thunder storm.
Lying in bed, shaking off the idle thoughts brought on by sleep and rising to a much more acute state of consciousness, I reflected upon things that used to scare me a lot more than the thought of a storm or tornado.
If you can believe it, when I first moved to Tennessee, I used to go play out in thunderstorms with my younger brother. I had much bigger things to be scared of at that age, like how I would enter into a new middle school eighth-grade class without any friends.
I remember the first day that my mother dropped me off: I cried because I was genuinely afraid of how I wouldn’t know anybody because I was the “new kid.” It was definitely a defeating feeling, so defeating that during the math class that I had at the middle of the day, I retreated to the bathroom and cried until one of the teachers told me to go back to class.
A couple months into school, I finally found my place in the eighth-grade society and actually enjoyed going to school in Tennessee until I graduated from high school.
Now, I’m in college and would like to assume that I lead a somewhat stable social life, but am not ignorant to the idea of someone facing the same problems that I once had and would gladly impart what limited knowledge and wisdom I have on the subject.
Tags: Justin Morton, Bryan College, Tennessee, Middle School