Reflection On Time 2

 Barbie, you have really mulled this over. I know you said that you'd rather claw out your own eyeballs than go back to any reunion. But what if, just play along Barbie. What if for those few short hours in time, you get to go back. To be who you were, the same kid with the same attitude?

Would you? Could you?

You see I am the shy quiet girl (figuratively for you, but literally in my high school) who sat in the drama class and never said much of anything and spent a lot of time looking at the floor. I didn't disappear..I chose to live, to come out of my shell and grow.

I am also the girl who started a family. Perhaps too soon and it has not only aged me, but has given me insight and strength. With those added insights and strength, I found a unique set of  tools and hopefulness to teach the family that I created early on, not to walk down the same road that I have.

You never really get to go home again. The buildings are there, the structure's the same, but nothing else seems familiar. 

But if you give yourself permission, permission to just be who you are. Permission to not care about the "cliques" to not notice who was the popular kid and who were the nerds. Permission to mix and mingle and perhaps get to know that one person you have always wanted to talk to, but wouldn't, couldn't or were far too shy to. You might have fun and for a split second go back in time, so that those who didn't know you then, who never knew you were alive or didn't care that you were will leave that reunion with your name on their lips and your memory etched in their mind. And then you will have touched the world.

Just a thought. 

Reflecting On Time

I kind of whipped this up while I was sitting at work and thought I'd share it. It'll explain why I'll likely be in a really weird mood the next few weeks. 

Perception is an odd thing, especially when it involves something as abstract as time. A day can drag on and "last forever" while weeks, months and years can seem to disappear in a flash.

I like many of you possibly have; quite a few years ago, subjected myself to one of the most spectacular examples of this phenomenon: my high school reunion. My graduating class had about four hundred and thirty people in it. I wouldn't say I really knew a lot of them, but I could probably have picked about two thirds of them out of a police lineup by the time I graduated. In the months and years that followed, I lost contact with... well, just about all of them. I never saw them around town for the brief time I returned home and then moved out to the sprawling metropolis of York Region into the USA.

It wasn't quite a "small town", with right around 12,000 or so folks living in the area at that time, but people sure lived like it was. It was everything you'd imagine a large rural high school to be, right down to the cheerleader sex scandals and hockey heroes who always managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time after the last school bells rang. Some went to college, others went to work, still others started a family right away... or worked on raising the family they already had started.

There was always that bittersweet mixture of joy and tragedy, opportunity and wasted days, youth and death. I remember the honor student who had a few beers and fled the local cops for fear of getting busted. He wrapped his car around a tree and died on the scene. There's always that tinge of the tragic around youth. It's never quite the carefree time that is romanticized in music or movies or TV. Everyone had their scars and trials and burdens to bear, but most came out of it okay. At least, they came out as okay as an seventeen-year old kid could at the time.

We made it through, got our diplomas, hung out at parties for a few weeks afterward and went our separate ways. I think of all that I've personally been through in those many years away and how it's shaped me. I've made decisions and paid the consequences. I have some fantastic memories and bitter regrets. I look in the mirror now and I don't see the baby-faced teenager who walked off to college with a baby in one arm full of hopes and dreams of being a profiler. Sometimes I stand and stare at my reflection for just a few seconds and think of how it's all different now.

Now I can say I got to go home again. I got to walk into a big room with mid-80's music playing loudly and shake hands and exchange laughs with people I never really knew to begin with. I got to also see some people I did know pretty well then. I looked into their eyes and searched for who they used to be... and it wasn't there. None of us were really who we were, or who we were going to be; because that's how time works. All the hours and days and months and years just kept adding up, and it was all there on display for me to see. I got to see how the homecoming queen aged, I heard how the quiet girl in my politics class just disappeared one day, and for some strange reason, it hurt me. I got to see the question in so many hearts, "How did this happen? I wasn't supposed to be there, like this, at this time. I was supposed to be someone else."

We'll all be different from who we were. Just not whom we thought we'd be.

That's time.