Ten Years.

This year I celebrate ten years since I graduated from high school.  As things go, that means that it is time to celebrate with our first class reunion.  When I was still close with a few friends from high school I figured it was a done deal, I would definitely be going to the reunion.  However a few things have changed in the last year and lately I haven’t been so sure.

Despite being friends with 50 or so people I went to high school with via Facebook, I am not really in contact with anyone from that time in my life anymore.  It’s somewhat sad but I seem to have lost contact with all of my friends from high school.  Sure we occasionally say hello to one another on a social network or chat in passing at Target but it’s more like acquaintances than friends nowadays.  I am now surrounded with friends whose children are the same age as my own.  I think that’s pretty typical, but I wonder what will happen to those bonds when our children get old enough to make their own friends.

So I wasn’t so sure I was even going to be attending any reunion when I got invited, via Facebook of course, to join a Facebook group entirely dedicated to my graduating class’ reunion.  A week or so later I even got a personal message on Facebook asking whether or not I was planning on attending whatever event is chosen.  The note moved me, that someone actually gave a hoot whether or not I would be attending the reunion kind of made my cold heart soften, just a tad of course.  Then yesterday I noticed that I had been tagged in a picture on the group wall.  The picture is from Ring Dance, junior year.  I’m wearing that cheap velour dress I bought from Value City.  My mother’s friend had tried for over half an hour to do something with my dense coarse hair (ah, when I had a full head of hair, those were the days).  My girlfriend and I went to the dance together.  She didn’t have a date and I was hopelessly in love with a guy who had moved across the country to live with his family, so I didn’t have a date either.  We rode to the dance in my little ‘89 Pontiac Sunbird with the ewok, Wicket, hanging from the rearview mirror and probably Dramarama playing on the cassette player.  That picture really seems to have shaken something in me.

It’s not that I have decided to attend the reunion, they have after all, joked about having it at Putt-Putt.  And it isn’t even that I am nostalgic for old times or old friends, even though there are honestly a few I do miss or would like to see.  Honestly, it just made me feel old.  And not ten years older.  Like twenty, maybe even twenty five.  I honestly don’t even recognize the girl in the picture.  I went and looked in the mirror afterwards just to see if it was me. 

My face is clearer, that’s for sure.  My hair which is still falling out, is shorter with lots of gray.  My eyebrows were….oh let’s just say my mom used to affectionately tell me I looked like  Brooke Shields, but only in the eyebrows and only Brook Shields in the “Blue Lagoon” movie.  My sense of fashion in no keener.  But it isn’t just in the appearance that I look so different to myself, it’s the fact that I can almost feel the ten years difference when I look in that picture. 

They’ve picked a date for the reunion.  I don’t have a run or adventure race so far that weekend.  But babysitter’s aren’t always easy to come by and I’m pretty sure the only way they’re going to want your children to come are as 2x3 wallets.  It’s in October, so I have time to think about it. 

But it didn’t hit me, until I saw that picture, just how long ten years feels.