Things you can put down now

(originally posted 10/4/2009)
In 1997 I went with some friends to the local movie theater to see “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion.” I spent an absurd amount of time working on my hair and makeup and picking out the right thing to wear, because in high school movies aren’t about movies, they’re about guys. Actually, when you’re a straight 15 year old girl everything is about guys, but I digress.

I watched the movie about two women venturing back into the murky waters of the high school social strata via their high school reunion. They decided to impress everyone who had been mean to them by inventing impressive—if fabricated—lives, including their being the inventors of Post-it notes. It blew up in the faces. There was a helicopter and a choreographed dance number. It seemed the way a high school reunion should be.

I hadn’t thought much more about the film until my mom mentioned it in reference to my upcoming 10 year high school reunion. “That was about a 20 year reunion. I remember, because they were all old,” I told my mom.”Are you sure? I think it was a 10 year,” Mom answered. I looked it up and sure enough, mom was right. Had I really thought 27-29 year olds were “old?” Had I ever been that person?

I started thinking about how the person I was in high school was someone else entirely from the person I am now. As if more proof was needed to cement the idea, I recently read a letter I wrote to myself to be opened in 2009 back in 1999—the year I graduated. The person behind the scrawling print on the aged paper wasn’t a bad person, but she was also not someone I could relate to now at all. She had seen very little of life or love or loss or pain or redemption or failure or success. Those are things time brings us, if we are lucky. They are the things that take us from who we were to who we hope to become. And that Laurel, the 17 year old one, hadn’t been weathered by them yet, and was less polished for it.

The letter was helpful in regards to my decision to go to this reunion, because prior to reading it I’d just been thinking in terms of the people who were mean to me in high school or who I hoped to show up. Suddenly I realized those people-- the popular ones, the mean girls, the guys who didn’t notice me—they don’t exist anymore. They stopped existing 10 years ago, when life started to happen to them too. Each of us has been changed. Each has been eroded and shaped and polished with experience and hopes and failures and loves and deaths and kids and mortgages and passports and mistakes and joint checking accounts and faith and dogs and promotions and marriage and divorce and the realization that our parents are real people, not gods or demons. And while none of us been shaped by all of those things, each of us have been touched by some of them. And those things change you. Any grudges born now at the people who wronged us in the past are born at ghosts. You might as well throw punches at an echo as hate the kids you knew in high school.

It was liberating, really. All those things, those petty things we carry from our teen years, could finally be set down. I felt the bone-deep relief of setting down weights I’d forgotten I’d even decided to pick up.

As I got ready for the reunion, I didn’t feel any need to “show” anyone. I didn’t need to impress anyone. I just wanted to be able to represent myself as I felt I actually was—no more no less. And while I did agonize over what to wear, it wasn’t because I wanted to reemerge through the years as a sexpot, but just that I hate going anywhere feeling like I’m not looking like me, if that makes sense.

When we first arrived, the room was set with several long banquet tables. My old lunch group gathered around two tables near the back of the room. The “cool kids” still had their own table too. I still wasn’t part of it. The only difference was this time, I didn’t want to be, and didn’t feel purposefully excluded. They wanted to catch up with their old group, I wanted to catch up with mine.

After the meal people began to mingle in a way that would never have happened in high school. Maybe it was the alcohol, but I think it was more back to my earlier epiphany. We had new things in common, and old things that seemed very unimportant and very, very far away. I felt no hesitation in approaching anyone. Homecoming court and stoners, band geeks and honor society, cheerleaders and drama kids—all had been touched by the same years I had. And I’d lived flashes of each of the roles they had pigeonholed themselves into in high school in the years since graduation, so I felt an odd sense of understanding for who they’d been. More importantly, there were no more band geeks or cheerleaders, there was no more homecoming court. There were moms and dads, husbands and wives, people worried about their careers and deadlines and the economy, people with hopes and dreams and pains a million miles from where they were when we donned our grad caps all those years back. Just people.

There was no helicopter, no choreographed dance routine (unless you count the hustle). And while I strongly considered telling people, ala Romy and Michlle, that I invented Post-its, no one asked. They were too busy sharing stories of their kids and laughing about how dumb we all once were.
I laughed too. We were dumb. The cliques were dumb. The stigmas were dumb. The worries and troubles were dumb. The anger was dumb. And it was all done and gone. And we were all the better for it.

As I left the room filled with more of us than have been together since graduation, I was quite a few pounds heavier than I was way back then. I’d never felt lighter. I’d left the last of my weighty high school issues with my empty water glass in the banquet room. I came home and hugged my parents, who had been watching Kat, kissed my sleeping child on the head and thought about how happy I’d been to have finally had a date (my husband) for a high school function.

Okay, so it’s not as climatic as leaving my reunion in a helicopter. Still seemed a pretty good “happily ever after” to me