Reunion

I spent two hours this morning on Facebook, looking at pictures of people I went to high school with. I feel compelled to explain that this was made possible by a massive group list of invitees to my 10 year reunion, that this wasn't two hours spent skulking stalkerisly, but two hours of moderately-committed browsing. Think of me less as the man in a black sweatshirt darting lawn-to-lawn and peering through windows, and more the guy kicking back poolside and scrolling through his cell phone.

It's incredible seeing the difference 10 years make. I can only imagine what this will be like after 20, or (knock on wood) 30 years. Some of us have grown beards. Others have gone goth, metro, cowboy. Most of the men who stayed in California have bulked up considerably; some of them have even managed to stay in shape.  Our faces are the same faces, adorned with different hair cuts and outfits and spouses and children and lifestyles. All of us look older. 

I won't be attending my 10 year high school reunion because I've only just moved to the UK, though I do find myself wondering if I would be attending if that weren't the case. I think the answer is no. There is already too much quiet panic simply sitting here in my flat, flipping through this combination Rolodex-Time-Machine, simultaneously experiencing what feels like both memory and future, somehow.

Yours truly on the right, high school edition

It seems to me that for almost every person, attending your high school reunion must be a psychic tug-of-war between observing what people have become and wondering what their impressions of what you have become might be. And I can't help but wonder if it's actually something buried beneath the skin of that dynamic, something simpler and more solipsistic: I wonder if maybe we are unsure of who we have become ourselves. I wonder if we flip through photos and attend 10 year reunions because we require some sort of general calibration to understand who we are 10 years into adulthood. 

This may not be true for everyone, but if I'm honest, this is true for me. I search the faces of people I haven't seen for 10 years for glimpses of my own reflection. I feel like a man who has somehow forgotten what he looks like. After two hours of this exercise I land back on a picture of myself and I wonder - how much have I aged, exactly? How do I measure the silver in my hair? How far from my bones hangs my skin? What are the new trimmings around the recognizable core of my face that I have somehow learned not to see over these last 3,650 days? 

The people from my class have migrated to sundry careers and livelihoods. We are assistant managers at local car dealerships. We are buyers for Target. Some of us have become, inexplicably, bona fide ranch hands. And all of this, as dizzying as it seems, is the easy stuff. It's the stuff that you can measure and understand, somehow. What someone looks like. Where they work. How many kids they have, and with whom.

But the thing you can't measure, and I think the thing that terrifies me most about walking through those doors, is how you've aged and grown emotionally, intellectually, and morally. You know, all that cheap, flimsy plastic "who-you-are-as-a-person" bullshit. What terrifies me specifically is that I do believe I've grown in all of these ways (I've quit drinking, I've entered a long-term partnership, I've committed to loving and doing right by my peers and friends and family), I believe I've grown in all these ways but I'm terrified that it's not actually true. 

I think it's easy to be someone new in a new place, with new people. People who haven't seen you drunkenly take out your anger and frustration on your best friend. People who didn't watch you blunder from one fuck-up to the next for four years. People who haven't observed you at your most soulless and truly vacant. I think we live in the lie that the person we are is the person we are right now, currently, in this moment and over the past few weeks or months or years. But in truth, I fear the person we are is who we have been, at each and every moment until now. I fear that we are the litany of ourselves. 

I do think people change, and that people can improve. But maybe we don't change or improve as much as we think we do, or as much as we need to believe we have in order to make it through each day. Maybe the person who we actually are is like that ever-recognizable aspect of our face: slightly saggier, puffier, done up in more makeup or bordered by more gray hair, but unchanging in some essential way that is hardwired into the human brain. And you can almost imagine it jumping out at you, after those first few steps into a dark room done up with streamers and half-full helium balloons, a room of muffled music and heavy heat; you can imagine that core aspect of yourself searing like a light bulb in the darkness, transforming you from a stranger into someone that has always and will always be known.