With the amount of knowledge we’re all expected to absorb on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that certain things, certain memories, get rather crunched back in the depths of thought storage. Although my archives are awfully dusty, when I find occasion to grab a flashlight and start shifting around, I’m pretty impressed with the degree of organization. 

Some drawers in those archives came under scrutiny this weekend when my high school friend walked back onto the scene, and gave me the chance to rediscover the relics there and polish them up a little bit.

She wasn’t married, hadn’t gained a hundred pounds, didn’t have children. Of course I recognized her, of course she was—and I was—the same.  Older and adult, sure, but we were still us. I don’t know why I got myself worked up,  though the unknown can be a bit distressing.  She was doing her thing much the way I’m doing mine; a parallel life that, by some shift, found reason to cross over once more. 

I think I talked my throat raw catching up.  And not just catching up: remembering and reliving, too.  It was like my mind jumped back to high school, and I suddenly found myself fluent in the sagas du jour: homework assignments that seemed impossible; TV shows that had everyone talking; who was fighting with whom in our class.  The teachers we had and the wrongs their exams surely wrought on our young minds; who got what car when she was sixteen; and the best ways to leverage our uniform to prevail in traffic court.

I represented Sweden in our 9th grade model UN, for instance.  Totally forgot about that.  I got an A in pre-calc mainly by cashing in on the liberal extra credit system.  She had no idea; I had no idea I still knew.  But there I was, high school me in the head of who I am today, chattering away.  Like how we used to make up—as in, really, truly fabricate—ridiculously involved Biology projects that we had to work on all day Saturday at her house, when all we’d really do is watch her taped Friends and Party of Five episodes.  My mom didn’t allow my sisters and I to watch these shows.  Why?  Because they promoted bad family values, apparently.  I don’t think she realized what life was like behind the veil of our convent school (and yes, there were nuns involved).

In a lot of ways, our high school was a breeding ground for sheer ridiculousness.  It was a tiny grouping of unusually privileged girls, most of whom had no responsibility or appreciation for their situations. We had the shenanigans of most high schools taken to an extreme by basically unbridled resources:  drinking in the parking lot, but from a stash of grey goose in the trunk of someone’s beemer; drugs, but lines of coke in the bathroom of the country-club class Christmas party.

This is where she and I got on so well, my friend and I.  We were—and are still—more the quiet type.  Not shy, and not unliked, but not your outgoing popular girl.  We were naïve beyond ourselves, but we weren’t stupid.  We both knew exactly what was going on, and though we weren’t exactly invited to participate, we wouldn’t have.  We were too busy being kids, or doing homework, or something. 

I surprised myself with how much I remembered, but with that remembering came again those feelings—what it was like, who I was, who I wanted to be and the fears that I’d never get there.  It was validating to be able to go to that place as the more confident magda of the future, and I think it was for her, too. But still, it’s with a bit of a smile that I file these memories back away.  I like touring the museum of me, but I think much of what I see is best left beneath the glass.  Preserved, but no longer living; instructive, but not precedential.  I exit back into the cold air, but I know it’s still waiting for me whenever I choose to journey back.