In May, my old high school gives graduating seniors this All Night Party -- they blow our entire senior budget on turning the gym into a real-life casino, and let us spend one last night in the building we had called ours for so long but no longer can. Around 3 a.m., I realized that I would never spend so many consecutive hours in this run-down building ever again. I realized that the next time I entered, I would have to check-in with the front office as a visitor.
I think we, as humans, desperately want everything to fall apart without us. I see, on occasion, pictures of my underclassmen friends at homecoming and at marching band practices, and I get a sense of cognitive dissonance -- what do you mean? How are they having homecoming without me? As though I was the key part of the functionality of homecoming. But here's the thing: I went to a giant public school, with administration far above my head and children coming up behind me for decades. My high school is going to live forever, overflowing with the tales of thousands, while it remains the only story I'll ever tell. It's a relationship with no closure.
I've actually long since come to peace with that; that yes, I'll be penning romantic posts dedicated to my high school until I die. Perhaps my descendants will even publish a post-mortem anthology of my letters to Troy, and you, my dear reader, will get to revisit these tales with the satisfaction and knowledge that you were part of the story the first time around. So the truth I've been forced to confront recently is not that, but something far sharper. Something that felt like drowning in an ice-cold water bath: that memories are faulty.
You see, I recently discovered that I'm a frequent topic of conversation in a group chat I'm not a part of. It angered me -- that these boys, these children, had the audacity to spread lies about me three years out from our most recent interaction. That so-called friends I had given countless hours to sat silently, neither defending me or caring to. My mother egged me on: they're jealous, misogynists, need to be blocked immediately and never spoken to again.
But even though spite drives me faster and further than regret, I eventually chose the path of self-reflection. Perhaps I don't remember high school that way; in my head, I was glistening with joy and youth, one of the few places I felt completely safe. I believed in the Golden Rule far too much to ever be impolite, let alone unkind. I wasn't particularly fun or funny, but people could come to me with their problems and I would solve them every time (even if "solving them" simply meant asking my mother for a sound-byte of advice to pass along).
But clearly, not everyone remembers me like that.
I often think about whether or not I'd like to be famous. When I was younger, I wished for it desperately, if only to meet Lin Manuel Miranda and Emma Watson. But now, I think it might be my biggest fear. I don't believe humans are meant to turn the camera on themselves so often, or to see the bird's-eye perspective of their own lives. It must be so strange to be Taylor Swift; to have a personal memory of your life and a live-action movie playing constantly on the internet, forced to reconcile what your eyes remember with what the camera shows.
But what if the camera is the only semblance of objectivity we have? I'll never know which memory of me -- my own, or the group chat's -- is closest to reality. My mother always told me that "if someone says you hurt them, you can't just decide that you didn't". But isn't that exactly what I'd be doing if I unilaterally decided that The Group Chat was simply being malicious? I can't figure out if I should feel remorseful or indignant.
Right about now, I want a panel of objective judges to grade my morality and character using footage of my entire life. Something about admitting that seems traumatized; like I'm searching for academic validation on my entire existence, which is both ridiculous and deeply sad. So instead, I scream into the void, shouting lessons back at my younger self and hoping she'll learn them faster than I did, disappointed but not surprised when she never replies.
And this, too, feels like a relationship with no closure.
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