You never know when something might happen that will threaten to alter the way that you perceive your existing reality. Sometimes it’s a big thing that happens like a career change or a job loss; a marriage or a divorce that will serve to re-inform and then reshape the certainty of your own private universe. Perhaps a significant introduction or maybe a serious illness will force you to have to reshuffle your deck and deliberately contemplate what you have been accepting as part of the absolute way that life “just is.”
Sometimes, however, it’s a little thing that happens; a discreet, unassuming, yet intrusive little nudge, that beckons quietly and—
in the middle of the night...
I was sitting at my desk, mindlessly surfing the Internet in an attempt to unwind and relax when, with a single point and a double click, I found myself right back in the twelfth grade. I had Googled my way to yesterday via my high school class reunion website. Like magic and without warning I was seventeen years old again. Transported back to a time and a place I had intended to forget; that I thought I had left behind forever, I was grateful for the opportunity to simply remember.
It took me more than a few minutes to recover from the sobering realization that, in my desperate haste to grow up and “get the show on the road,” I let high school pass me by. So anxious to dismiss everything that was familiar to me in exchange for my chance to conquer the world, I plowed through my classes and my mid-terms and the parties and the proms, and all of that delicious adolescent heartbreak, as if somehow, the future would get impatient and maliciously leave me stranded in my teens.
Once recovered, I settled in for a trip down memory lane.
I surveyed every inch of that website. Picture after picture, I struggled to put the names to the faces. Page after page the memories slowly returned and I tried to reconstruct that part of my life, as if in successfully doing so, I might be granted a chance to do it all over again.
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