Letting Go of the Past

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Letting Go of the Past

While looking around the Classmate's sight, I couldn't help noticing that the only folks who'd posted pictures were the ones known as geeks back in high school. The guy who'd served as President of the AV club. All the members of the Math Team. And fat Bessie, who has opted to go by her formal first name of "Elizabeth."

I also couldn't help noticing that all of the geeks had grown into perfectly normal-looking adults. There wasn't a pair of high-waisted courderoy pants to be seen. No horn-rimmed glasses or pocket protectors. No cowlicks standing up on their foreheads. And as for Bessie, well, she's now gorgeous. No doubt, that's why they posted their pictures: to show they'd turned out fine after all. For a few tortured moments, I was tempted to do the same.

I wasn't one of the geeks in high school, but I wasn't the knock-out, either. The truth is, I never really fit in anywhere. In a school of 300+ kids, I knew everyone by name and they knew me. I might drink a can of pop and talk about lip gloss during morning break with some of the cheerleaders, then spend lunch smoking to Black Sabbath with the stoners. I was invited to just about everyone's slumber- and birthday-parties, but because my very strict mom, who was raising me on her own, went to college during the day and worked at night, I was rarely allowed to go. I had my share of crushes and boys who had crushes on me (although the two never coincided), and even though I went alone, I attended every school dance and never lacked a partner whether the songs were good or bad.

Looking back, I realize I was very, very lucky. I got to skip most of the traumatic crap. I didn't spend mornings agonizing over what to wear to insure or elevate my social status. I didn't sit by the phone waiting for a boy to call and then crying into my pillow when he didn't. I sipped purloined beer a couple of times with the popular kids and tried pot with the stoners, but I never got pressured into doing it regularly just to be part of the crowd.

Because I wasn't.

And that, if anything else, is what I remember most painfully about junior high and high school: the freedom of being neither a popular kid nor a geek, a beautiful kid or a dog, a smart kid or what back then we freely called 'retards,' of being able to hang out with any or all of these groups on a given day depending on the mood I was in. Yet that very freedom created a paradox, because I woke every day with the cold, stoic knowledge that there was no where I really belonged.

Reading through that website's list of names from my past reminded me of all of those things. Oh, I was curious about how everyone turned out. Does Bessie, now that she's lost 60 lbs., realize that she's beautiful or does she in the mirror the same pudgy cheeks that pushed her glasses onto her forehead whenever she smiled? Is Knock-Out girl still gorgeous, or did she peak in high school and spiral into mediocrity afterwards?

I thought a lot, too, about those names from my past whose names didn't appear on the list and whether they're even alive. Where is the boy who pursued me in sixth grade, the one whose strange eyebrows made me think of isocolese triangles and whose feelings I just couldn't return because he was so darned nice? Or the girl who moved in ninth grade only to return a year later, the one we found out was pregnant after being raped, who put her child up for adoption? Did she ever truly understand that what happened was not her fault, that she didn't need to take on the shame which seemed to drive her to sleep her way through most of the boys in the school after she returned? I thought about all of them long and hard, about all of the kids whose lives had once been tangental to mine, whose faces and names and memories are all part of the collage that makes up my past.

But I just could not bring myself to pay for the service, no matter how curious I am about where their lives are now. It wasn't about the money. It wasn't even about my desire to squash some of the rumors that sprang up when, in the tenth grade, my mom decided that she couldn't handle being a single parent anymore and sent me to a boarding school where I was so miserable that I took a triple-load of classes so I could graduate at 16 and live on my own (another story altogether and one I promise to share at some point). Oh, the stories I know that must've spurred!

My reasons went beyond my intense unwillingness to exchange a flurry of missives with one of these folks from my past in which we would attempt to "catch up" on the past 20 years and pretend to a depth of friendship we'd never really felt. My reasons were even deeper than a refusal to be like Bessie and various others who posted autobiographies detailing their successes in the last two decades, as if by convincing the rest of us of their adult importance they could change the childish perceptions we had of them.

What stopped me was the senselessness of paying today to belong to a group of people I never really belonged to in the past, a group whose relevance now depends utterly on my willingness to share this person I've become, this life I've created. I was close to doing just that. So close. But then, as Elton sang, "sweet freedom whispered in my ear...".

And sometimes you just have to flip the bird at your past.

I am glad for the person who I am today, for the way my life has turned out and the opportunities that tomorrow will bring. I owe all of that to who I used to be, who they were, and what happened back then. I know that the woman I am right now while my son plays nearby and my husband, safely returned from the Philippines just last night, sleeps soundly in our bed -- that woman is an alloy, a product of the past and the people who were in it, of all of those things mixing together in just the right proportions in a crucible of just the right intensity.

But like any process of creation, time itself was a necessary factor. Time -- and time alone -- is the reason that all of those familiar names no longer represent actual people to me but, rather, abstract composites of various memories. Time is why we are no longer pimple-faced teens, why we are now men and women with spouses and children, mortgages and car payments, season tickets and country club memberships and all of the other trappings of adulthood. Time is what gave us the chance to become the people today that as children we knew in our hearts we could one day become.

Contrary to what my mom told me twenty years ago, these are the best years of my life, and all indications are that even better years lie ahead. So as I sat there with my credit card in one hand, my mouse in the other, I realized I was being asked to pay for a tunnel in time that would lead me back through those twenty intervening years to who I once was and the things that once mattered to me. But tunnels are two-way things, and just as this one would allow me to reclaim friendships and memories from years long gone by, it would also allow those very things it into my present so that, ultimately, they would become part of the today that is shaping the woman I will be tomorrow.

When I realized this, I put my credit card away and closed that web site's window. I told my daughter that I love her and I played on the floor with my son. I tiptoed into my bedroom and kissed my husband's sweaty forehead as he slept. And I felt overwhelmingly happy because I know there was a time nearly 20 years ago when I wouldn't have believed I could feel the joy of belonging anywhere or to anyone like I belong here, now, to these people. They fulfill all of the dreams that I'd had when I was younger, and because of them my present is full and rich. Nothing is lacking, and there is no room for what once used to be. And I know without doubt, tomorrow will only be better.

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