I wish I had taken more pictures.
I wish I had laughed more, smiled more, and really just appreciated it more. From this moment on, I am an outsider. Whenever I hear the cadence and see the band marking time, I will no longer be a part, feeling energy surge through me as we march onto the field at halftime. I was so stupid, to let pride get the best of me. If I had just accepted the fact we had a new band director, and remembered that even though the director is a very important part of the band, he wasn't the band. The band was everything: the marchers, the color guard, the pit, the instructors, the field, the instruments, it was every little part. The band became what we molded it to be. All the sweat and blood we put into the show would determine how we felt about band, and I lost sight of that this past year. If I had put as much effort into it as I had in the past years, I would, without a doubt, be in band next year. No question.
But I didn't, and that is why on the first Friday of the school year, and the first Saturday, and every Tuesday and Thursday from then on, I will take a moment to remember what great times I had the first and second year of show band. I'll remember my first football game, and my first competition, and the end of my first season when I, although glad to take a break, was ready to start it all over again. And now I will enter my senior year without a reason to finish all of my homework before six o' clock, and without a reason to look forward to October and November, except to get through them. I will be sitting in the stands at competitions, watching as the band – without me – marches their show with as much spirit as I once had, and will never recapture. Now I only have memories of what was once my whole life, and is now just a painful reminder of what I could have had.