By Nick Cortese ’23:
Dear Reader, I have been writing to you from The PhoenixOnline for the last four years, but right now, let me paint you a picture. No, I am not an artist. Never have I wrapped my hand around a brush and kissed a canvas with the bristles. Never have I laid my hand onto a plane, causing it to explode with vibrant colors. But I need you to trust me. I need to paint you a picture.
I want you to envision yourself after a long day. The weight of mere air has been dragging you down for hours on end. Seconds could not tick by any slower, as you impatiently await for the time to descend into slumber. At last, you arrive at what can only be your final destination, the borderland of earth and water. As you gaze into the horizon, you realize you cannot turn back. Instead, you soak in the scenery. The seething orange sunset wrestles with the calm blue sea, filling the sky with a pink offset. Slowly but surely, the sun will fade into the night, disappearing along with any color it produces. Yet, you are not afraid. Instead, you open your mind. Physically, you await the unknown, weighing in on the journey through a sanguine reflective lens. Spiritually, you transcend reality, sailing into the fire.
I chose to open up this letter with an artistic facade because when I was younger, I aspired to be an artist. My dream was to bring characters to life using basic, minimalist elements: I never used a paintbrush or a marker or a crayon. All of my sketches were jotted on looseleaf using the same pencil I wrote my notes with in class. In the personification of those figures, I found the person within myself. A pure feeling blossomed within my psyche. But at some point, that purity withered. I wish I could have pinpointed the moment that the passion within me started to melt away, but I could not. Instead, I had to watch as darkness seized my ambitions.
Each objective I set would seemingly come up shorter than the last. Following the moment I fell out of love with illustration, I attempted to pursue a career in baseball. When I got cut – twice – from the Kellenberg team, I tried to redirect my sorrows by teaching myself how to play guitar. After a year of pouring my heart into practice with no improvement to show for it, I came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time and quit. Trial and tribulation operated as a tag team, blindsiding me with hardship and relentlessly striking my self image with shame. At one point, I lived in fear of failure. I would go to sleep teary-eyed every night, praying that I wouldn’t dream because I dreaded the thought of my fantasies reaching their demise.
I spent the last four years believing my high hopes never made it off the runway. As I began drafting this final PhoenixOnline post, however, it hit me that my ambitions live on. Subconsciously, I chased after my faded dreams, and over my treacherous journey of high school, those dreams morphed into the goals and achievements I hold today. The prevailing variant of Nick Cortese is a writer. The same pencil I used to etch drawings as a child is now the implement I use to compose dissertations. The boy who formerly delineated lousy cartoons has climbed a once unfamiliar mountain and rose to the rank of Editor-in-Chief of the PhoenixOnline. My entire high school experience was an extended period of growth into the person I am today, and I was clueless of that fact until after I graduated.
The words I framed in my opening include the resting period after an excruciating journey to demonstrate that dawning moments post-graduation are not coincidences. Even the most optimistic mind must profess that they have met calamities in their high school excursion. But no matter how bitter that feeling may have been or even continues to be, I realized, standing on the stage at Hofstra that while I was for so long afraid of the things I loved fading away, I am now loving the things that have come into a new focus.
A quote that has aided me in my new understanding came from filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock who said, “If you can place the origin of your fear, it will disappear.” There is a level of understanding about life that must be met before I make significant advancements. This is why I can’t turn back. Why I must immerse myself in my reflections of high school, because once I do that, I, like many of us perhaps, will find that some of the best moments of our lives have come from the pro-gressions we once saw as re-gressions.
The descending sun is symbolic of our times at Kellenberg. Everything we built, the bonds, the knowledge, the character, is growing distant from us. But we do not let any of it slip away. We ride into the sunset, chasing after it. As we advance forward into college, we take our high school memories with us. The further along we move on our odyssey, the more luminous and colorful our lives are. I know that I am about to start a new chapter and that its journey will be even more tiresome and difficult to tame. But I have learned too much in high school to let go of my experiences. The past has molded my present.
Yes, I am an artist, and yes, you are too. You may not be a painter and you may not be a writer, but you are an artist. Artists have real people within them. Artists have sentient abilities that differentiate them right now from past versions of themselves. I look around the Kellenberg community and I see passionate souls with unique creative expressions glowing from within. We as artists all sing soliloquies of our personal revolutions, and whether we like it or not, we will continue to be carried forward through further adjustments. Let us not forget the past adventures that have formed us. Do not forget me, do not forget our friends, and do not forget Kellenberg. Let’s chase after our goals, sail into the fire, and use our wisdom to operate greatness.