Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

“See you at the 10-year reunion”

That’s what one of my high school friends (Gretchen Wieners) wrote in another’s (Karen Smith) year 12 yearbook, I found out a couple of years ago. Now said reunion is coming up in less than a month, and I doubt either of them will turn up.

Back in high school, I always thought the 10-year reunion would be a rather Romy & Michelle-type affair, to which my best friend (Regina George) and I would show up in brightly-coloured, self-made outfits, dance to ‘Time After Time’ and finally (if begrudgingly) be recognised for our true quirky brilliance. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m now more inclined to view my high school years as something on par with Mean Girls - and yes, that makes me Cady Herron (ultimately good intentioned, but not good intentioned enough not to do some not-so-nice things).

I didn’t go to my five-year reunion, for similar reasons it seems a lot of people won’t be going to the 10-year one (minus Facebook, which didn’t exist back then). All the people I wanted to keep in touch with, I still spoke to. Who I was at 12, or 14 - or 17 for that matter - was irrelevant to my 22-year-old self, and trying to communicate with people who only ever knew me in the vaguest of terms seemed both impossible and pointless.

As I wrote at the end of 2006:

I only ever hated high school in retrospect.

Sure, there were things I didn’t like about it while I was there – bitchy girls, insufferable teachers, the feeling of powerlessness about one’s own destiny – but for the most part, I think I thought it was quite okay. And I’m sure that if dug out my diaries from when I was 17, I’d find a sad, nostalgic throwaway line about how, now that’d I’d left high school, I’d never have fun again.

It was only after I left that I began to grow cynical about the curriculum geared more towards regurgitation than critical thinking, the idea that you had to walk from room to room whenever a bell rang and ask for permission to go to the toilet, and the idea of a dress code.

But I think the reason I dislike high school so much in retrospect is because everything that came after it was so much better. It was like being kept in prison for 6 years, not knowing anything else, and then finally being set free and realising what a crap situation you’d been putting up with for so long.  

All of which, if a tad melodramatic, is still true enough. And I totally “get” why some people don’t want to go.

But for me, the point of the reunion is not to play “fake nice” with people you have no intention of seeing for another 10 years, or to finally prove to people how awesome you are. The beauty of the 10-year reunion - and what makes it so different from the five-year one - is that enough time has passed and enough distance has been created that you can actually get to know your classmates as the individuals they actually are, rather than the blunt stereotypes you imagined each other to be.

As I wrote at the beginning of 2005:

there is this particular awkwardness between people who went to high school together, but who were never friends. There is this merge of distance and proximity – you know the person and you should say ‘hi’, but on the other hand you shouldn’t, because the only way in which you really ‘know each other’ is as a couple of ficticious “characters” which have nothing to do with who either of you actually are or ever were.

And of those people I wasn’t friends with in high school whose paths I’ve crossed with since, the surprise hasn’t been - as people always talk about - the schadenfreude of what losers they grew up to be, but of how interesting - and in most cases lovely - they turned out to be.

So while I have little desire to reminisce about days that didn’t hold a candle to the ten years that followed, I’m kind of looking forward to reconnecting. Or more accurately, connecting for the first time.

It’s the ambiguity, stupid

We’ll fast forward to a few years later
No one knows except the both of us
And I have honoured your request for silence
And you’ve washed your hands clean of me
- Hands Clean, Alanis Morissette

Back when I was 19 or so, I wrote an embarrassingly naive article for the university newspaper wondering why - despite the fact that we were obstensibly adults - the simple act of having a crush on someone remained the subject of such secrecy and intrigue.

The better part of a decade later not much has changed, I realised when the aforementioned Alanis Morissette song began to play on my recent Great Central Australian Road Trip with my beau. Not between said beau and I, of course - that relationship is thoroughly in the open. But in almost every other crush, flirtation or momentary mutual infatuation I’ve entertained in the interceding years? Ambiguity has reigned supreme.

I look at it differently now than I did when I was 19, though. Back then, the silence and secrecy seemed to arise from a sort of immaturity and shame - the idea that admitting that you might actually be attracted to someone rendered you vulnerable and open to rejection. Now it just seems that sometimes, some things just don’t need to be said.

There is no need to ever acknowledge that once upon a time I liked you or you liked me. That she discreetly pretended not to notice the night he tried to kiss her, that he meant something more than ‘thank you’ by that bunch of flowers, or that perhaps she went a little overboard with the SMSes. Perpetual ambiguity allows everything to continue as it did before.

And as a strategy, it makes sense - what does Australian courtship mean, after all, if not always being able to say, “What do you mean, I was hitting on you? I was just being friendly!” Why not continue with the plausible deniability after the flirtation has passed?