Thu 1-22-2009 Go Back !

I just remembered why I don’t go to class reunions – not for grammar school, (yes, they had one), high school or even college. It’s like that scene in Say Anything where Ione Skye is doing her valedictorian speech and she’s telling them not tp progress in their lives or to forge ahead into the future. She tells the kids to “go back” because they are just ending one of the best, most positive times in their lives. From here on out, life gets infinitely more complicated and gritty. So they should go back since what’s ahead is less gratifying than the now. She means it as a joke, but all you hear is crickets at the end.
When I think of reunions, I think of people who used to be friends trying to outdo each other with their impressive careers, their expensive houses and cars, their beautiful and sexy trophy wives and their lavish lifestyles, usually built on a foundation of bullshit and self-loathing.
The most disturbing thing to me is that these images make me think of a group of words that saddens me deeply. The words “might have been” scare the crap out of me and depress me because it means someone abandoned that part of themselves, their best, truest self and threw it away so they could buy into someone else’s dream. They molded themselves in the image of someone else’s idea of success and left behind their own aspirations to become one more in the endless sea of lemmings clawing their way toward the abyss.
These people might have been great as something ordinary. Instead, they chose to be ordinary in a world someone said was great. They put more faith in another’s vision than in their own – and that’s where the road less traveled branches off deep in the forest. I wish they would “go back” and choose the right path this time. That would be their best chance at real happiness.