Why I Don't Return There

Long drives lead me to long thoughts. Sometimes, they even lead to epiphanies. My recent drive down to Oregon lead me to a surprising one.

I have never been to a class reunion with the class I graduated with. In fact, since my mom moved away from there in '91, I have been back exactly once, for the wedding of my step-niece. I spent my last two years of high school and three summers between college sessions in that town, but have had no contact with my old friends since college, except for a very brief moment in the "greeting" line at my little brother's funeral.

I even looked them all up in Facebook a little while back. I think I mentioned that in a post not long after. Part of me felt an instant compulsion to get in touch with them all, to reignite old friendships if possible. And immediately upon the heels of that came a feeling of revulsion and anxiety so severe it was almost a panic attack and it gave me a pain deep in my abdomen. So I didn't do it.

Still, on occasion, the compulsion comes back. Put up a FB page in your old name, it says. Get in touch. But I ignore it.

The idea wandered again into my mind during my drive down to Oregon and I opened my mind to it so I could explore it. I don't remember why or how I lost contact with the last of my high school friends. I do remember a feeling of anger. After I broke up with my boyfriend, he was all nice to me about it, but managed to turn people against me behind my back. (And I'm sure he never told any of them about how he would call me — collect — from the base after he went into the service, crying about how much he hated it.) I was left with a couple of girlfriends with whom I spent my summers when we all returned home between college sessions. But for some reason, that ended and I don't know why. I don't remember.

So why do I always say no when an old high school (and post-college) friend gets in touch (via a mutual friend) to ask if I want to be found by the reunion search committee? Why the revulsion and the anxiety? I wanted to know.

It boils down to the fact that I hate that place. I hated that we moved there, away from the place and people I'd known all my life. I hated the pitiful excuse for a high school. My cat was shot a few months after we moved there, and I'm sure I know which of the neighborhood boys did it. My dad died of a heart attack in our backyard. My little brother is buried in a cemetery less than a mile from our old house. Even when we first moved there, I hated the house: I could barely stand being alone in it, even in the daytime. It felt bad in that house. I was gloriously happy when my mom and her husband moved away from that house and that town.


For me, that town is all about pain and heartbreak and loss. I had little in common with my high school friends, other than being in the same place at the same time.

So why did I keep wanting to reach out to them? Well, I've lost my entire immediate family, and I only have the barest connection to my half-brother, aunt, and a couple of cousins, and none at all to the rest of my extended families. There's hardly anyone who knew me when I was a child, who knows my history. My oldest friend didn't meet me until I was 20. He never met my dad or my brother. I wanted some kind of connection to my past like that.

I tried getting that connection by going to the 20th anniversary of the class I would have graduated with if we hadn't moved after my sophomore year in high school. I grew up with those people; I figured that if anyone could provide me with that connection to my childhood, it would be them. But only two people remembered me, and one of them looked so broken and beaten down by a life so much less than what he should have been living that I could barely look at him. That event finally cured me of looking to those people to connect me to my childhood.

It makes sense that I would have a desire to reach out to someone now that my mom is gone, but it isn't a good idea. It isn't a good reason to reach out, and the lack of commonalities — and whatever caused us to lose touch — are most likely still there. Reaching out for contact would probably be as bad as, or worse than, my attending that other reunion.

I have to accept that I am the only one now who remembers my childhood and be content with that. I dwell in the past too much anyway. There's no one to reminisce with, no one to remember old jokes with. That hurts me a lot. And I think it's tied in with my continual search for "home".

I lost my feeling of home when my little brother died. My mom remarried, and my home was no longer with her because she was tied with her new husband and for the first few years, she shut me out a bit. While I still anchored myself to her, never having wanted to sever the umbilical cord all the way, and I anchored myself even more to her when I lived near her for those years in Oregon, she was never again my true home.

I know, intellectually, that my home can be wherever I am and that no one else can be my home. Maybe realizing all that I've written here will help me know this fact on a deeper level finally. I'd like that.