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fifteen years ago It felt good to be able to think yesterday. After a poor start on Tuesday that carried over into Wednesday, Thursday was the first day in my weekend where I could relax and bring my thoughts into focus. With my new living room furniture in place, I sat back, sifted through my bills and other paperwork then thought about what I was going to do for the rest of the month. ... I knew where they were stored, but I didn't open the box until yesterday. There wasn't any reason to have them out in the open on a bookshelf. It wasn't as though I was going to flip through them on a daily basis. They were a part of my past and I have enough going on in my life without having the past mingled in as well. For the first time in nearly two years I paged through my high school yearbooks and they had more of an impact on me than I thought they would. How could a book have such an effect? It wasn't a novel that I loved or even a textbook. It was simply a picture book filled people who were mostly memories to me. I hadn't spoken to them on the phone yesterday. I hadn't even got an email from them. Yet these were the people that were a large part of my world for three years. These were the people who I saw five days a week if not more for months at a time. It was odd, but it made sense to look at the books at least once before I went to the reunion. I vaguely remembered what had been written, but my memory didn't quite match what was on the page. Yes, there were a few have a great summer entries, but then there were the more personal ones that I can't really describe. Eighteen-year-old people trying to say something meaningful that may or may not have its intended effect. Some of those people did stay a part of my life for the first post high school years, but time and distance took most of them away from me. Personally I don't see anything wrong with that happening. People change and I hope that I have changed in some ways since I was eighteen. What was important to me then probably isn't what drives me now. Tomorrow night I might see some of the people that scrawled those messages over a decade ago and I'm not sure what to expect. Will people fall into the same cliques that existed in high school? Will there be anyone there that I want to see? Will it be a waste of time? All of those questions are negative, but there is the possibility of something positive happening. Maybe I'll make a connection with someone that I shouldn't have let go. Maybe I am over analyzing something that will come and go in the space of an hour or two. Besides I can always use the excuse that I have to work and leave early. I'm not required to stay the night. I'll freely admit that going to such an event does make me feel old. Almost half of my life has been spent beyond high school and I have no intention of romanticizing those years. It wasn't a tragic time of my life, but at the same time it isn't something that I want relive. When I was eighteen, the idea of being thirty-three was beyond me. Fifteen years into the future was not something on my mind. I was having enough problems trying to imagine what college would be like in the fall. If I seem naive now, I was far more innocent then. I don't think that I was writing at the time, but I can't remember making any predictions about what would happen to me and that wasn't something that was done in the yearbook either. I think that I just wanted out of high school. Four years was enough. I wanted something else and I got it. There was the frustration and fun of college filled with more exotic people than I knew from high school. Now, however, I realize that those people who I thought were so unique were probably just trying to be something that they couldn't be in high school. |