Opaque Lucidity

The Way We Were

Kelli received an e-mail today from a friend with whom we went to high school. She was seeking contact information for a classmate that neither Kelli nor I have spoken with in nearly seven years. This classmate and I were once very close friends, but our lives went in different directions. That's the way it goes sometimes.

The e-mailer, who is female, is recently divorced and is in a relationship with a former college boyfriend. While I am certainly no mind reader, I read her request for contact information as an attempt to contact yet another link to her past. It is not my place to pass judgement on her actions, but we do have the right to be bystanders instead of participants. I've participated enough.

Even though I have not talked to our lost classmate in the better part of a decade, I know him well enough to know that he has spent very few moments in the past 18 years thinking about our female friend. I also know, as she does not, that he did not like her very much in high school. She was a drama queen, as so many of us were. He was one of the few who was truly grounded, although he had his own high hurdles with which to contend. When he and I and our group of friends left high school, we all left town---they for college, me for the Navy. Only I came back.

I think many people do themselves an injustice when they try to fit old classmates (especially from high school) into their lives as adults. There are exceptions, of course; there are a handful of school friends with whom I remain in contact. But these people are the exception, not the rule. Perhaps I am bitter or not a very good friend. I simply have never understood the need for people to "re-connect" with the years that were, for many of us, not a whole lot of fun. They may seem fun in hindsight, but I seem to only remember insecurity and broken hearts.

So if I were to talk to our female friend (I won't), I would tell her to move on. The past is to be studied and learned from, not re-lived.