Marilyn Santiago

Photojournalist
    
THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE SIMPLE, BUT THEY FORGOT A SIMPLE THING...
Public Project
THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE SIMPLE, BUT THEY FORGOT A SIMPLE THING...
Copyright Marilyn Santiago 2024
Updated Jun 2020
Topics Adolescence, Community, Documentary, Education, Emotion, Family, Friends + Family, Happiness, Joy, Love, Parenting & Family, Photography, Relationships, School/College, Teens, Youth
    The instructions were simple, they will meet at a parking lot and then they will be escorted by police to the graduation grounds in a huge parking lot, surrounded by nature and the Sahara Desert air. Once at the parking lot, a big stage and a big screen showing pictures of them through the years, they were to stay in the cars, a kind of a auto-cinema thing. 
   But they forgot one big important detail, THESE ARE TEENAGERS that has not seen each other in months. They were robbed from those important last months together and IT WAS THEIR GRADUATION DAY! It was bad enough that they were not going to have a normal one, so rules were just one more thing that were not going to be normal. 
You see, we are in Puerto Rico, you know, that little island with hundreds of earthquakes, the quarantine, and on top, as you can appreciate in the pictures, living under a dense layer of air that won't leave us alone. Still, none of it mattered, it was graduation day and nothing was going to ruin it! In less than five minutes all of them, all 15 of them were hugging and taking pictures non-stop before being called by the director, one more time, to behave and go back to the cars. But little do you know, all the school teachers and the director herself were a part of it. 
"La felicidad se tiene que arrebatar" I heard someone once said, "happiness has to be taken" and they did not hesitated. Covid was conveniently and partially forgotten, and the dust, well, not an issue. This was going to be short and they were not losing any moment. They were together one more time, one last time, and that was all that mattered.

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THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE SIMPLE, BUT THEY FORGOT A SIMPLE THING... by Marilyn Santiago
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