Reunion Redux: Once More, With Feeling!

I have posted a few (okay, several) times about my abiding sense of awkwardness and loneliness. This was particularly true at last year's UWC reunion. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to go again this year, largely because I wanted to see my first-year roommate, of whom I have fantastic warm memories. I am very glad I went. At the end of the weekend I said goodbye and embraced everyone, relishing the knowledge that twenty years and thousands of miles have not diminished our friendships. 

This year has been one of transformation for me. Having begun my personal fitness odyssey, I am no longer as overwhelmingly ashamed of my physical self. I have revisited my priorities, and am working to take care of my emotional health. I have learned to speak in the gibberish of self-help gurus.

Perhaps that's why with this group I didn't feel the need to try so very hard to impress. I was delighted to meet up with my roomie and several other people I really liked then, and still like now. We laughed, we wrote together, we reminisced. There were many hugs. It was good. I also spent time alone, enjoying the beautiful weather and some much-needed solitude. And I danced until my feet ached, joyous in the company of dear friends.

Like last year there were a number of scheduled activities, most of which I skipped this time around. One in which I did participate was a remembrance ceremony. Walking to the  garden felt like approaching a funeral, especially when I saw boxes of tissues at the end of each row of folding chairs. Still, there was a certain peacefulness sitting under the pine trees, listening to the low murmur of voices dulled by the wind in the top boughs.

Below the bright blue sky we honored benefactors I never knew, and mourned classmates I  wished I'd known better. Mourners spoke of the friendships forged at the school, and the lives changed by them. And, during a passionate speech in which he expressed his gratitude for the school, his now-deceased parents, and the twenty years of students he has taught, a marvelous teacher spoke about how honored he has been to love and be loved his students. One line rang through me like a bell: "it is easy to give love. It is difficult to receive it".

For more than twenty years I have mistrusted most affection I have been offered. Believing that I would be mocked or somehow humiliated if I responded, I practiced diffidence and deflection. I was fine offering myself, giving of myself, but I read sinister intent behind the most casual, unintentional slights. And I have missed out. I I know now that my fear came from a lack of self-worth, and I am trying to change my thinking. I will continue to give. Now I must learn to receive.

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was hurrying to catch a bus for which I was desperately late. Instead of feeling frantic and guilty, though, I grinned and hurried and just managed -- awkwardly dragging a suitcase and stumbling through doors -- to make it on board. I looked around and saw dozens of people I have known (including those I'd just seen at the reunion), all smiling. In the past I would have understood them to be mocking my ineptitude. In my dream, though, as I searched for an open seat, everyone was gesturing eagerly for me to join them. As I flopped down in the nearest available space I laughed, filled with delight at the love and friendships that surrounded me.

Reunion

I drove far too fast to get there. At first I credited the freedom of travelling solo. I had no worries about snacks or potty stops. There was no peacemaking from the front seat. Instead I turned on the radio so loud the windows shook and I rocketed through the sere landscape. For once there was solitude to marvel at the bare bones of the earth revealed by twisting golden draperies of vegetation and contrasted by the endless cerulean sky. I overtook a storm and flew through it, a Valkyrie dodging cars like they were standing still. The chill rain flew in through open windows and I tasted the greys and pinks of the clouds and flew even faster. I drove more than 300 miles in four hours.

Later, at the outskirts of town, I pulled to the shoulder, shaking and sobbing against the steering wheel. I finally acknowledged that my urgency came not from joy but anxiety and the pathetic fear that no one would remember me. Once my tears dried I debated running away, but instead went forward through the sheer mists of memory overlaying the landscape in front of me.

At the front desk I stumbled through the first greetings, relieved slightly by awkward hugs. I searched for beloved faces, and the warmth of embraces offered first through Facebook, and then in person. Yet, as always, I felt as if no one knew what to do with me – including myself.

And so it was for three days. I've never been good at small talk, and what is a reunion but chit-chat? I did find some old friends, and we explored our new selves together. I basked in their company. I spent a great deal of time with other people's children, enjoying being an auntie. I caught up with people I probably should have befriended twenty years ago. But the only time it was easy was a night meander through the grounds, chasing ghosts with someone who once owned my heart. We walked, and remembered, and I surreptitiously searched for the source of my loneliness, as if I could turn off a tap from twenty years before and retroactively find happiness.

During the day I practiced polite smiles and inept escapes when the silences grew strained. I was baffled by pronouncements of great friendship from a man I had barely known, and unnaturally hurt by the woman who refused to speak to me despite two decades of distance. I hid at night in my room, staring at the ceiling and listening through the window to drunken declarations of love and undying friendship, and longing to belong. And still I searched, but by then I didn't know what I was seeking.

I caught it on my last night, for just a moment. We danced, as we'd done so long ago, in a darkened room to music that had beaten its way into my bones and heart. I swayed alone, forgetting propriety and how to protect myself and for a brief, fleeting time I felt the limitless possibilities of being 16 and surrounded by brilliance and excitement and joy – a sense that just by being there I was changing the world for the better.

I left the next morning after a few brief goodbyes, relieved that I had faced my fears. I still love the school and cherish my two years there. My memories are deep and strong and vivid. Yet I have a lingering feeling that I failed somehow to truly live my time there, and that failure has followed me since. I drove home more slowly, mourning what could have been.