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PAST

9 November 2009, 21:35

It’s a rather warmish afternoon here in Hee Haw. Having a bit of free time makes one do strange things. And since I am the queen of strange activity, it was no different for me. I started looking up friends from high school and college. Looking up my past, I guess.

One thing I’ve discovered is that I had no desire to touch that part of my life anymore. Not to relive it, not to revive it, not to have much to do with it. I don’t know why. I felt uncomfortable thinking of myself as that person. I don’t know really why I felt like that. I wasn’t a bad person. It just seems like I was a different person, but one I don’t want to be anymore.

Those people from high school, they all seem so foreign to me. And they all seem so older. High school, especially, I wasn’t comfortable and I wasn’t confident. I felt ugly and ignored. I wasn’t popular and I was insecure. I’m not like that anymore. There’s not a whole lot of good feeling I get from thinking of that time, and it just seemed like all the ties I had to those friends and that life were abruptly cut by me for some reason. I never thought I probably was a big part in any of those lives so they all feel like strangers to me now. Even those who were my best friends, when I moved on from them, it was quick and abrupt – that I remember.

Also, my bad experience in high school makes me see these people, not as the mature adults they’ve probably grown into, but still as they were to me in high school. They weren’t nice, and they weren’t kind. I wasn’t a jock, or a popular person. I wasn’t one of the ultra smart or ultra dumb. I wasn’t a partier nor a stoner. I was one of the invisible, and the dismissed. The ones that were abused off hand by those who could. We weren’t the targets but just the periphery. Those people didn’t know us and didn’t want to.

Another factor is that my life has crashed and burned in the last year and a half, with me trying to rebuild myself. In moving, my main goal was to escape that person I was, and all her limitation and expectations. I had less confidence. I had less pride. I had less. And even though now, I have less in the physical and tangible aspects than I had, I am a different person – one that I like and one working toward an image and aspect I want to be. Thinking about the past, and even looking at the pictures makes my chest tighten, and returns me into being that scared little girl, the insecure young woman, the weak person that I don’t want to be anymore.

That’s why I don’t contact Angela, or Christina, or Sherrie from high school. Best friends from a world ago, a person ago, and an era I don’t want to remember. It’s almost when I moved, I killed what was left of that person. A part of me died when Ken did, and the rest went when I moved. I’m not sure I am a better person than I was, but I am a different one, uncomfortable with the one from so long ago.

I do have good friends in Dodah I would love to stay in contact with and visit. But I think the person I was before 1996 has been long gone, and the one I was afterwards moved to North Carolina and changed (maybe grew). I have people here, there and well, everywhere else that see me differently, and who’s eyes don’t trap me in that cage from the past.

I have a plethora of people now that don’t know me as that woman, that little girl. They see me as confident, beautiful, smart, if not a little eccentric and melodramatic. I have a life now that is all potential and I may feel scared about where I am and where I am going, but I no longer fear who I am and who I could be.

So, I quit looking people up. Sometimes the past needs to stay in the past.