I did not go to my high school reunion in Gainesville, Florida, this past weekend and I can’t stop thinking about it. I knew it had potential. I seriously considered going. I wanted to go. But this past summer turned into one of caregiving after my husband pinched a nerve in his back and couldn’t leave the couch. When he eventually could, it was only for a few steps with a cane. Summer felt very pandemic-isolation-y.
As the date for the reunion approached and I looked up flights, ticket prices were high and I discovered that it would take five to six hours with a stop in Atlanta. So I gave up. A long-distance friend remarked, “It’s a lot of effort for a party.” A local friend commented, “Why go hang out with people I don’t care about when I get to hang out with people I do care about?”
That’s the thing, though. At the start of the pandemic, I relocated to Minneapolis, which is one of the more challenging cities to break into its social circles. Sure—I’ve made a couple of friends. But I work from home and on any given day, it’s lonely. I’m a social butterfly who yearns for connection. I’ve learned to collect snippets of belonging by being a regular at certain restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and a farmer’s market, where staff sometimes greet me enthusiastically. But it’s not the same as friendship. It’s transactional, my therapist reminds me.
Gainesville is a university town, which likely played a role in all the cool kids who attended my high school. I was too self-conscious to consider myself among them, but I’ve evolved enough to fantasize about the thoughtful conversations I may have engaged in at a reunion. And I would have even seen a couple longtime friends who live across the continent, in addition to a couple more people I care about but haven’t seen in years, and folks with whom I’ve engaged on social media because we have more in common now than we did back in high school, or it no longer matters much. Connection connection connection. Scrolling social media after the reunion, I choked up over photos and comments praising, “The event was amazing!” “The conversations were amazing!” “Everyone I graduated with is amazing!” I knew it.
Conceding with regret has me confessing insecurity. It would have involved an off-schedule hair highlight and more composure to seem like I’ve retained a scrap of youth and am living well. My high school self also used masking tactics. The first two years, I spent a lot of energy pretending I could afford Guess jeans and didn’t live in Section 8 housing with an emotionally immature mother who let her college-aged boyfriend move in with us. The last two years, I feigned having the freedom to be rowdy as I otherwise studied hard to earn grades good enough for a college scholarship and managed life with an emotionally immature, alcoholic mother pining for her college-aged ex-boyfriend.
“Living well” is so subjective, isn’t it? How you frame it makes a difference. My husband hasn’t regained the active lifestyle we’ve always lived together, but he gets out more now. I became a sportswriter turned memoirist since the last reunion, which is sorta interesting. This year, I was a winner of a small writing contest, and I recently had an essay accepted for publication in an anthology. This time last year, I was in Iceland for a private horseback riding retreat. And I live in Minneapolis. The creative energy here—in music, art, performance, even lawn and protest signs—knocks my socks off.
Framed otherwise, Minneapolis can be exceptionally challenging if you didn’t grow up here. And since the spring of 2020, when I arrived, the city has suffered several unspeakably tragic events. Resulting trauma caused scarification on the soul of the city and its residents. Even on a good day, I feel everything so intensely. And I’ve been working on this memoir project for over a decade. I know it’s better than ever, finally close to what I want it to be, but it’s been a freaking decade and the agent I thought I had secured bailed on accepting new clients during the pandemic. . . six years ago.
Minneapolis has undoubtedly changed me; decisions I’ve made over the past couple of years have changed me that much more. I feel like a different person living on a different planet than my high school self and even the self I was at the reunion twenty years ago. I’m hoping to ground myself in who I’ve become so that when I dive into my flesh-and-bones past (as opposed to the memories I tread around in for my memoir), I feel self-assured.
My indoors-y summer may have morphed me into a hermit. These days, I’m conserving energy to pick up groceries at the co-op where the cashier asks how my husband is doing and tells me it’s always good to see us. And for dinner at our favorite Monday restaurant, where the chef greets us with a smile and even made me a special batch of his chili crunch oil without onions, because I can’t eat onions. Evenings, I’m on the couch watching The Diplomat followed by whichever engaging Korean drama my husband and I are hooked on. Some days, those snippets are enough to feel like living well. So here we are—busy recharging my butterfly self and looking forward to that next reunion.
