My ten year high school reunion is scheduled for this Saturday. I am, begrudgingly, attending. Why begrudgingly? It’s none of your stereotypical reasons. I wasn’t bullied in high school. I was relatively well liked. This is before I started spending most of my time in front of a computer screen, so I was fairly social. I actually had a few close friends and was friendly with everyone. The question remains: why am I begrudgingly attending?
At first, I thought my reluctance was rooted in my feeling of separation from my fellow graduates. Out of the approximately eighty students in my graduating class, I regularly talk with two to four of them. I recently deactivated my Facebook account, but even before then I rarely communicated with anyone else. They were doing their thing and I was doing mine. Separation seemed inevitable. We had our own lives to live and I was busy living mine.
Earlier this week, while driving to work and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, I was hit with these lyrics:
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
- Lyrics from Pink Floyd’s Time from Dark Side of the Moon
I slowly realized that my reluctance was not from the separation: it is from sadness. We spend most of our childhood after a certain age, looking forward to our high school years. I can remember wishing away my childhood for those four years. Before I realized it, that time was gone. I was heading off to college. With, what in retrospect feels like, a blink of the eye that time, too, quickly passed.