HIGH SCHOOL AND ME

I have a high school reunion, coming up, in just a few weeks. Its been nearly twenty years, since I have seen most of the people I graduated, with.

I have been woken up, with dreams over the past few weeks. They are dreams where I am 16 again. I am back in school, surrounded by familiar faces, hallways and classrooms. These dreams force me to remember my life. What I subconsciously visualize at night, stays with me through the day. Going back to the town that I grew up in, and being surrounded by faces that I spent such a huge part of my formative years with...is proving a much headier experience than I anticipated.

Those years were nothing short of torture for me, although I realize they can be painful for almost everybody. There are the few who soared, who seemed to have the Midas touch, and floated along in a friend filled life full of football games and date nights. For me....it was a prison sentence, for a crime that I never committed. Of course I was an odd little creature....and you dont have to look much further than a school and the students within, to view examples of the cruelest, of human behavior. Especially in a small town in central Maine.

I am looking at a picture of myself from when I was young. I am smiling in it. My heart breaks, because I know that the very boy Im looking at, woke up many nights....staring out his bedroom window..... hoping that if there was truly a god...that he would just stop my heart, and let me die. Even sadder....he also pictured himself walking into a school assembly, and plunging a knife deep into his guts, for all of the students to see. I feel sadness for him, because he wasn't dreaming of his future,....of college, or finding love, or traveling the world. He dreamt only of being cold in the ground. No 15 year old should be in that place. They arent equipped.

When kids were being cruel, what they could never have known was that my home life was equally as torturous. I never had a moment of safety in my life. I look at this picture, and I remember my hair falling out in clumps. I remember migraines. I remember it taking a couple of years after I had graduated, to be able to walk into the middle of crowd of people, and not have panic attacks, out of fear that someone would do something, to hurt me.

I also feel for that boy in the picture, because he would grow to be an adult, who would always feel like a failure. An inherent failure for being who he was.....and having no means by which to change those flaws. I feel sad for that boy who looked at the people who showed compassion, as divine creatures from heaven, with the unworldly capacity to be kind to a horrible person, like himself.

I feel sad for the man I am now, and for all those years wasted. Wasted because I felt like I had failed, when the trueness of it all....... is that I survived. Just surviving, means all the success a human could wish for, and I know that now.

A reunion is many times...a time to see who got fat, who is going bald, who has the cutest kids, and who makes more than $100,000 a year. For me.....I dont feel any of that. I only want to celebrate the people who were a part of my life, that I once looked at with such shame and heartache,.....but now look at, as a true testament to who I am.

Who we all are.

Some were kind. Some cruel. Some were both. All I know, is Im one hot bitch now.