LETTER: Reflections of a MHS Graduate

I look at my reflection now. A lanky man, or kid, or somewhere between, adolescent patches of a struggling beard, uncombed hair, shirts that are too small because I haven’t stopped growing, a faded black backpack, ripped jeans, and fingernails scrubbed clean from persistent nagging. My dad still cooks breakfast for me, and I still bite my fingernails, I still get excited when Sponge Bob Square Pants comes on, and cereal is still my favorite food.

I may appear to be a child to the naïve outsider, but the black bags hanging from my eye sockets, and the black bag hanging from my back tell a different story, a story of late nights, hours and hours of work, and the most difficult, absurd, and – looking back – the most defining four years of my life. High school, oh my deepest and dearest woe, the penitentiary of puberty-plagued personas, where I struggled for some slice of independence, of uniqueness, stability, in a land of greasy foods and television, where the falcon cannot hear the falconer, and each stop upstream, further into the war-zone, is one step closer to utter insanity.

But I survived. Thank you . Thank you to patient teachers, to role-models and educators, to classroom captains who genuinely care about their students, because this has made all the difference. My four years would not have been so vivid without goofy English-teachers who pushed forth the bounds of prose with Laffy-Taffy jokes, or short redheaded mathematicians who challenged the abilities of the human brain through speaking at the rate of 1000 words per second, or music conductors who, against a tide of teenage laziness, shaped pieces of music, or art teachers who, out of pure love for their craft, came to Malibu High School to preach the gospel of fine art.

Thank you to my classmates, to the eight hundred of us, chosen by the god of public schooling to all participate in the fluctuating, shape-shifting, always-drifting, brain factory that we wake up early each morning to go to. Kudos to the corky community that we have painstakingly built, person by person, and the halls filled with familiar faces, and the bizarre collage of personas that coat its walls with bright colors, abstract pictures, and a scatter of paint droplets, each a different student in the collection that Malibu has drawn together. We come from everywhere. We are musicians, we are writers, we are jumpers and sprinters, we are players and haters. We come from every corner of town, and we will go to every corner of the known universe.

There’s the kid who can fight King Kong with his karate skills, and the guy who can hack the CIA with a graphing calculator, and the girl who can play cello with her hands while playing xylophone with her feet, and they all wake up every weekday morning at 6:45 am. Yet what draws this unlikely crowd of ragged wanderers together beyond the desolate beach town from which we originate? I’ll give you a hint: it’s our school. We come together, like refrigerator word magnets; to create this strange poetry found nowhere else in the world except for right here.

Thanks to Malibu High School for an excellent education, for friendly janitors, awesome office staff, terrific counselors, fantastic (and fairly odd) teachers, and an incredibly audacious and varied class of 2012 to guide me along the way.

And now we are off, into the unknown in the land beyond Malibu. We will each go our separate ways, all with beautiful aspirations and an open road ahead. And even as we each secede from each other like the tips of branches on a growing tree, we will all have one thing in common, our roots are firmly held in those early years at Malibu High School.

Best,
Ethan Stockwell
University of Chicago, Class of 2016