 High School Reunion |
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I have always had a memory about high school. That it wasn't like other high schools. That we were all friends. That there were no cliques. That we were one, big, smart, multicultural family of weirdos. Drama weirdos, art weirdos, band weirdos, math weirdos, dance weirdos, language weirdos, chess weirdos, poetry weirdos, yoga weirdos, bisexual weirdos. Just ... weird. Weirdos. Everywhere. And in a way, that's still true to me. But after the 10 year reunion, I see it all a little differently. There were people I was friends with in high school whom I consciously avoided last night, and there were people I talked to whom I'd never spoken to before. It was weird. I'm still feeling a little weird about the whole thing. I'm still very close to most of my close friends from high school, most of whom were at the reunion. We laughed and held onto each other like we always have. We stole away into corners to talk about people and recall the mean nicknames we had for them. We sat on each other's laps and put our heads on each other's shoulders and drank too much and wept sincerely and posed ridiculously for pictures and professed our undying love and friendship. But it was just weird. Because I felt like we were outnumbered, that we were no longer the center of the universe that I had created in my mind and held onto for all of these years. I mean, there was line dancing. And a soul train. And we could simply not co-sign on that, clearly. There was the "most attractive" girl, who once dated S. junior year in high school, so I avoided her like the plague, terrified that she would ask me about him, not wanting to talk to anyone remotely associated with him, wanting to forget that he was ever a part of my high school experience or my life. There was my friend, half of the "cutest couple," who visited with the other half and his pregnant wife for a long time, confessing that she's having a baby of her own. There was another friend whom people kept inexplicably calling by the wrong name. There were a couple of people who assumed S. and I had gotten married, not having heard otherwise, and I think I handled it with great composure if I do say so myself. One was one of my dear friends sophomore year, and we hid in the bathroom at one point and talked for a few minutes. She cut straight through the bullshit, looking me straight in the eye as I sat on the closed toilet seat hugging my knees and she patted the sweat from her forehead with a paper towel, and said, "There are terrible things that have happened to all of us, and everything happens for a reason." It's nothing that everyone hasn't said to me a million times this spring, but it was nice to hear it from her, someone who knew me so well so long ago. There was slurring and silliness, but mostly, I just felt grown up. Like I like who I am and the people my friends have become, but we don't belong together anymore, as a class, as a big group of weirdos. We've all weirded out in our own directions, with our own problems and crises that were unimaginable when were were 17 or 18. There were so many babies at the crawfish boil, I was tripping over them. I don't know. I guess I felt guilty that there were people that I didn't even recognize and realized that I'd probably never even talked to them in high school. And I've always fancied myself such a friend of all mankind. And maybe I never was who I thought I was. And maybe the people I was avoiding were also avoiding me. I was holding my friend's five-month-old baby at the crawfish boil, and a girl whose name and face I could not place for the life of me approached me and said, "That cannot be your baby. YOU have clearly never had a child!" And I just looked at her and tried to ask her name as politely as possible and explained who the hell's baby it was. And I was like, "How can you tell? How you tell I'm just a crazy dog and cat lady and that one of these screaming babies or toddlers splashing in the mud is not mine?" And I don't know. Ick. It was just kind of icky, parts of it. But I'm trying to focus that I was there with people I really love and who still make me laugh until I practically wet my pants, even though we were so nervous on the way there that we were screaming, "I hate you!" to each other. I still have a group of people in my life with whom I've been through ten years of shit or more, and we're all still standing together. And no matter what anyone thought of us then or now, we know who we are in our own lives, spread far and wide, and who we are to each other. 
And looking at pictures from that night, clearly I had a lot more fun than I think I did.
© Copyright 2003 elb |
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