There was a place I called "safe haven". It was the 'playground' in my high school. The place was huge. In the middle there were grass fields with fences around with the sign "protect the seeds from being trampled". Since it was a girls' high school, there were not many girls who played sports. We did all of the PE activities in the school gym, so the playground was of no use in there. Other than the times when the girls rushed past the ground to eat lunch and dinner, no one walked past the ground during the day. The ordinary "playground-not-for-playing" was used as a parking lot for the teachers.
It was after dark when some people started to loom around the ground. At night it was hard to see who was on the ground because the school buildings shadow. Bored students would walk around the shadow of the buildings to hide from the teachers who always shouted at us to go in, stop talking nonsense and study. As per their efforts, the number of students who remained in the shadow of the buildings diminished. Maybe it was the time-ticking noise of the CSAT-College Scholastic Aptitude Test, an equivalent to SAT in the US in Korea-that shooed students away from the resting place.
However, in my case, for being a senior in high school with the CSAT drawing near, it was so suffocating to be inside the classroom where everyone in there was hyper-sensitive. It was as if they could boil me alive with flames shooting out from their eyes when they heard the otherwise slightest, unnoticeable noise like page-turning sound.
The place I found refuge was the ground. I previously did not walk around the ground because, although it is a shame now that I think back, I maintained a condescending attitude towards who did not study when they are supposed to do. One day after the early admissions were over, I felt useless. I felt as if I had nothing to do anymore even though I had CSAT left. I wanted to take a rest for a while, from all those people making a fuss over nothing. I walked out to the playground for the first time. When I walked around, it felt as if I was a human being again, not some machine that could heighten the place of my school on the hall of fame, in other words, 'schools with high CSAT records list'.
The place did not have anything much. There was a rusty basketball board that made cranky noises if touched, some trees and a human sculpture. The sculpture had a name tag on it, which read 'the founder of this school'. There was a legend that the object will make your dream come true if someone make a wish in front of this sculpture at midnight. Although it was not yet midnight, every time I walked past it I wished I could find out who I am and why I am here, the lost questions remaining unanswered in the battle toward college admission. Although I did not memorize some sociology terms and solved math questions, the times when I walked around the playground became a fertile ground for me to grow as a human. The times when I contemplated on what was the essence of growing up and being a human helped me to be a more challenging person.
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