Every year at Nobles, a teacher announces that the 7th-grade class will be creating a time capsule. You will seal your innermost thoughts, dreams, and your most prized possessions inside a box. You will not open it until senior year.
“Future you,” the teacher says, eyes twinkling, “will be SO glad you did this.” Future you will not be glad. Future you will want to be launched directly into the Charles River.
The concept is noble (no pun intended) in theory. A time capsule is a love letter to the person you’re becoming. It assumes that in a few years, you will sit down on the Beach, crack open that box, and feel a warm swell of continuity and self-knowledge. Look how far I’ve come, you’ll think, dabbing away a single, dignified tear while the sun sets beautifully over the athletic fields. What actually happens is that a teacher hauls out a plastic tub in the spring of senior year, and 18-year-old you opens it to discover that 12-year-old you was, with absolutely zero exaggeration, a complete and total disaster.
The letter to your future self always reads like a hostage note written by someone who had just discovered the thrill of using the word journey. “Dear Future Me, I hope you are still best friends with Madison. I hope you made JV lacrosse. I hope things worked out with that person from the Recess block. You know who I’m talking about ;).” This letter writer was blissfully unaware of the fact that Madison would transfer, that you would quit lacrosse after one preseason, or that the Recess situation would resolve itself in the most humiliating way possible at a school dance that several faculty members chaperoned and therefore witnessed. The letter always ends with something completely confident, like: By the time you read this, I hope you’ve figured everything out! Senior-year you, who spent last Tuesday stress-eating at Cafe 2000 while refreshing prom dress sites to see if your dream dress was finally back in stock, will fold that letter very slowly and place it back in the capsule for “safe-keeping.”
Then there’s the photograph. There’s always a photograph. You are wearing something that, at the time, felt edgy and cool. Your hair is doing something you cannot explain and do not remember choosing. You look like you were assembled by someone who had only ever read a description of a human child. You are making a peace sign in front of the Castle, grinning with the raw, unearned confidence of someone who has never once had to write a college essay about “a time when they questioned or challenged a belief or idea.”
The cringe artifact is the one that truly breaks you. It might be a printout of Harry Potter fan fiction, or a bracelet from a concert you attended with your mom, or even a handwritten, folded-up list titled something like “Cutest Boys in the Grade (Official Rankings)” composed in purple gel pen with annotations. These documents must never be shown to another living soul. They will be. Someone will grab it before you can stop them and read it emphatically in the middle of Gleason.
There is also, in virtually every capsule, one object that made zero sense even at the time: a single AirPod, half a granola bar from the Shattuck cafe, a rock — literally just a rock, a plain gray rock from somewhere on the Nobles grounds. No one can explain that. The seventh grader who placed it there had their reasons, and those reasons have been lost to oblivion forever, and honestly, that’s probably for the best.
The time capsule tradition endures because, despite all the inevitable embarrassment, it is actually kind of wonderful. Not because it shows you how much you’ve grown, but because it proves you were sincere. You cared so hard about things that didn’t matter, and people who maybe drifted away, and dreams that quietly changed shape somewhere around 9th grade. You took yourself completely seriously in the best possible way, on this campus that was still so new and enormous and full of people you hadn’t gotten to know yet.
Seventh-grade you, with the gel pens and the ranked list and the inexplicable rock, was not a disaster. They were just a Nobles student at the very beginning of something.
Still. Burn the list. Do it now. There are teachers everywhere.
