TheBanyanTree: Just thinking out loud

[Monique]

I can’t escape the past. Lord knows I’ve tried. I’m not the same person I
was then, which helps. After all, my cells have sloughed off and been
replaced by new cells since then, so I really am a different person. At
least that’s what they tell me. I think the cells that retain memory are new
too, they were just informed of what was going on before the old ones left.
Or the old ones left written instructions. I’m not really sure how it works.
Another one of those things in life that must remain a mystery because I’m
not interested enough to study the issue in detail. If I attempted to learn
about everything that puzzles me I’d never have time for the daily
necessities of life, such as eating, sleeping, working.

 

Tomorrow I’m seeing people I haven’t seen in over 30 years. Over 30 years.
More like 35 years. And earlier this evening I talked to a stepsister I
haven’t spoken to since her mother’s funeral many years ago. Now it is my
job to get in touch with the stepsister’s two brothers, which would make
them my stepbrothers, and who I’ve had even less contact with, if that’s
possible. She speaks to them frequently, so she can forewarn them. But
that’s another issue entirely having to do with an entirely different
situation.

 

Back to tomorrow. Many years ago, when I was in junior high school, I had a
couple of friends. One I went to church with, and while on a church retreat,
a retreat that involved much drinking among the high school kids (of course,
the preacher’s son was the worst offender of all), one particular high
school guy became particularly enamored of me. I don’t know why. It must
have been the effects of copious amounts of alcohol, or else I was just too
adorable to resist. One or the other. We made out in the hallway, while our
chaperones slept in their own section of the building. We were hellions. 

 

After the retreat I didn’t know what to think, assuming he didn’t really
like me, because who would, and that his behavior could be explained by the
alcohol. So I went on my way and that was that. 

 

One of my other friends did not go to church with us, but I spent a lot of
time at her house. She was everything I wasn’t – cute and popular and
independent. (Some of us have to grow into these things, but I am greatly
comforted by the newfound knowledge that while some of us grow into it,
others are growing out of it. It’s as if there’s a limit these sorts of
things, and in order to make way for new blood, the old must go.)

 

My family moved away and we lost touch, and except for hearing from her when
I was in high school once, after she’d found God and been saved (or some
variation of that), that was the end of that. Perhaps that was when she
started attending the church I’d previously attended, before I moved.

 

Several years ago I discovered somehow that she and the high school guy were
boyfriend/girlfriend in high school, which I didn’t know, since I was far
away from there by then. Then they went their separate ways for many years,
married other people, had kids, divorced the other people, and now they’re
living together and planning on getting married this summer. I found this
out because they live not all that far from me now. We’ve all migrated north
somehow. We’ve exchanged some emails, did just a bit of catching up, they’ve
sent pictures, and I thought, “Who are those old people?” (I like to that
that when people see pictures of me they think, instead, “She certainly
doesn’t look her age.” It’s important to have illusions.)

 

And tomorrow they’re coming to a party my fiancé and I are having. They’ve
been wanting to see me, and I suppose I wanted to see if it was really them
or not, and so I invited them. They’re coming all the way from Port Hadlock
for this. She mentioned to me, this evening as she was checking on
directions, that she was glad that he had remembered me. Of course he
remembers me – I was, for a brief illusory moment in time and space, the
love of his teenage life for that weekend. It’s all irrelevant now – it’s
like inviting strangers over, or the new neighbors who just moved in that I
haven’t set eyes on yet. If nothing else, I think it will be interesting. 

 

I’m always up for interesting.