Tuesday 15 November 2011

School reunions

So about 5 years ago I received a very friendly email inviting me to the 20 year reunion of our matric group. I must admit, I lost contact with almost everyone from school. The only person that I see very occasionally is a girl that used to be one of my colleagues while I was still employed by the Department of Justice, yonks ago.

I went to the reunion, I saw people that I went to school with, I went to bed. Somehow all the best intentions to go for lunch and keep in contact went astray.

There is a very good reason why certain people, like me, are not friends with people they went to school with. It is because we changed and the past is, it is said, a foreign country.

During the last 5 years I thought about the reunion occasionally. It worked almost along the same principles as a sokkie at University, except that no-one gets laid afterwards. You go up to people that you vaguely recognise, exchange pleasantries, ask general questions, you smile and you move on to the next person.

The questions I faced were rather intrusive though:

- Q: Are you married? No...(Startled silence from the Questioner/Inquisitor. The woman is 40 you know.)

- Q: Do you have children? No... (Startled silence from the Inquisitor...What happened to her eggs then? Did she sell it on the black market? How come she did not procreate? After all, her best days are over and women over 40 who have children usually give birth to babies with five thumbs and three heads, a Zaphod Beeblebroxian creation)

....oh...

- Q: Who do you work for? I do forensic investigations.

- Q: Oh, like CSI. That must be very interesting? No, like accountants, we read through a lot of documents and draft many affidavits. Kinda boring sometimes.

....oh....

But I have a couple of tattoos and I have a 3rd Dan in Taekwon-Do. And I've seen the Pyramids and the Great Wall and the Eiffel Tower and the Tsar's Winter Palace...and, and I have dived with sharks and swam in the Blue Hole...and, and I am in love with the most amazing woman on earth.

.....oh.....You just have not met the right man yet.

And I really, really wanted to tell her that she and her friends made my life fucking hell for 5 years of my life....and... that I was really wondering why on earth we were having this conversation...and...who was she to still judge me, albeit in a friendlier way?

But I didn't. As so many times in the past, I turned around, cursing my cowardice for not saying anything, and walked away.

The realisation dawned that so many things have changed and so many things stayed the same.

In the company of my long lost school friends (and I used the term lightly), I realised that the Queen Bitch was still alive and kicking, albeit with a husband, three children and a standing appointment with her Scrapbooking class.

And her antithesis, the ghost of the girl who always wanted to please everyone was also there, hiding in the shadows. No one wants to be unpopular.  La Reine est mort, viva La Reine. 

A couple of months I received an invitation to our 25 year reunion. For a moment I doubted myself, thinking that maybe I was oversensitive it will be a good idea to go and reminisce about old times.

But after I while sense and sensibility kicked in. Ghosts which were exorcised are not supposed to be invited back for dinner.

1 comment:

  1. It gave me the greatest pleasure to ignore my 10 year reunion invitation. If those people were friends of mine, we'd have been friends during those intervening years. I have no interest in discovering what happened to them, nor to share what I made of myself. They can suck it!

    ReplyDelete