Well, in case you were wondering, I have found the cure for my recent, ridiculous overabundance of nostalgia: my 20-year high school reunion.
Every day I drive 40 minutes to sit in an office in the basement of the house where I spent all but the earliest of my school years. The house where I woke up at 5 am so I could do my homework and eat breakfast alone and have plenty of time to put a shit ton of mousse in my hair (no big bangs, though. More like a skater boy cut. Yikes). Where I got in a shit ton of trouble because I got caught spending the night at my boyfriend's house instead of at Ingrid's. Where I cheated on said boyfriend and then broke up with him and then got back together and then finally broke up with him for good after my freshman year in college. Where I opened my acceptance (and one most painful rejection) letters from college. Where I sat in a cheap, low fabric chair on the deck, reading Orlando and longing to be grown up and make important decisions for myself.
Little did I know I was making important decisions for myself, and casting my character, if not in stone, than at least in something it would be very, very difficult to modify. I graduated from high school on a hot day in June of 1992 and surprised myself by sobbing at the very lame Project Graduation party afterwards. The summer after we graduated I saw virtually no one but my boyfriend. My best girl friend found alcohol and lost her virginity and hung out with other girls I had known for years but who never quite were my friends.
The roads leading to this house are all full of nostalgia-bombs too: the road upon which my boyfriend drove us, too fast and blasting Dinosaur Jr., to school every day. The road from the boyfriend's house I drove way too fast so I could beat a ridiculously early curfew. The road that twists up to the old grange hall where I was in my first "professional" theatrical production. The traffic light at the turn I took to my since-Jr-High crush's house on the day when I finally told him how I pined for him all those years I was his friend and confidante about all the other girls he dated (and how much was my life like a John Hughes movie?).
See? Everywhere I go around here, there is always something there to remind me. I have been spending the past year in the near-constant dull ache of nostalgia for days of old. For what was. I guess for what might have been.
And damned if there isn't a more bracing tonic for what might have been than confronting what is right now.
I did not keep in touch with anyone from my class but intermittently with said ex-boyfriend and one other girl who inexplicably asked me to be her bridesmaid. At our 10 year reunion I was newly transplanted to Brooklyn, super shiny and happy and in love with my life. So I went, and drank, and mingled with the barely-changed faces (the bride had gained weight but still looked and seemed essentially the same). Then ten more years somehow flew by and I moved back to Maine and bought a house with a boy and had two babies and wait how the fuck did ten MORE years go by?
And although I knew I would not know anyone, not really, at the reunion, I sure did have to go. My parents were lined up to babysit and I got my biennial haircut then nervously and uncharacteristically tried on several different outfits.
And thus coiffed and dressed we arrived at this ugly little cheap hotel event space. And BOOM went my nostalgia. All those familiar faces, grown rounder and softer. Everyone's voice sounds different than I remember. There were husbands and wives and pictures of children. No one is especially fabulous or especially grotesque. Stephanie was still a bitch, Melissa still smart and competitive, Marcy still bubbly and sweet, Laura still pretty and vapid, Dan still ruggedly handsome and vague. My old best friend Angela and I just sort of picked up where we left off and talked about life with new babies in our same old half-joking can you believe my LIFE way that we used to talk about our teachers or our crushes. The old cliques from high school formed again at the reunion, but with alcohol. We were just a collection of almost 40-year olds gathered 'round to celebrate the mere fact that we can still gather 'round. And then one classmate's band started to play and people started to dance and I am sure that is where things got more interesting but of course, I had to bail to meet curfew.
So. I still drive to my old house every day, and feel twinges of the past, ghosts of my decisions. But the ache is gone. We all just got older, but are not that old, and we wandered around living, but still have plenty left to do, and that is all.
xoxo, A
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