I Remember You. But I Don't Remember Me.

 

Last weekend I spent two days with my twin sister and three of our high school friends. We’ve only seen each other a handful of times over the years because we live all over the country in four different states and it’s hard to get together, especially as a group. To my surprise, everyone was able to coordinate their busy lives to make the weekend happen.

It’s been more than forty years since we became friends in a tiny high school on the south side of Chicago. We’ve lived all over the country and the world. Some of us have been married and had kids. Some of us have been divorced. We’ve lost parents and siblings. We’ve gone to college and graduate school. We’ve had jobs we’ve loved and jobs we’ve hated. We’ve each lived over half a century. The opportunity to come together and connect as older women was thrilling.

It was also slightly daunting. My twin sister told me that she almost texted us all that she had COVID on Thursday so she wouldn’t have to come. Another of the five said her daughter had to really egg her on so she’d follow through. I myself hemmed and hawed about getting on my 6 am flight after a long week of work.

But we did it. The five of us gathered at my mom’s house outside of Phoenix. We decided to hold our reunion at my mother’s house in part to offer her a distraction from the recent passing of my stepfather. I’ve been worrying about Mom being alone after over forty years of partnership. I thought bringing the old crew back would be healing for her. What I didn’t realize was how healing it would be for the rest of us.

We spent a total of forty-eight hours together. We drank coffee on Mom’s patio, hiked, shared meals, went thrift-shopping, and laughed. We sat outside in the sun or on couches in the living room drinking our coffee or our wine, sharing stories of our current lives and retelling stories from our high school days. We laughed until we peed. After a few hours, it felt like we were in high school all over again.

It was hard to believe that forty years had passed since we’d first become friends. It was obvious from the outside that we’d all aged, but energetically everyone felt fundamentally unchanged. As I watched and listened to these old friends, they felt utterly familiar — the dry sense of humor of one, the squinty-eyed cackling laughter of another, the overflowing curiosity of a third, and of course the life-long knowing of my twin sister.

They were all so familiar to me, yet as I thought back to myself, to what I was like at that age, I couldn’t place myself. It was as if I was a ghost. I wondered if I’d been like I am now — anxious and chronically planning, directing, taking charge. I wondered if my friends felt the same familiarity with me that I felt about them.

Why couldn’t I remember myself as a teenager? At age fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, I was so focused on the outside that I couldn’t connect with what was on the inside. I observed and studied my peers —  how to dress, flirt, eat, dance, and interact with my parents. I learned how to be from watching others instead of from feeling myself.

I thought back to how I was in high school. Our sophomore year I spearheaded a service group to help us bolster our college applications. In our senior year of high school, I planned our spring break trip. I booked the hotel, bought the plane tickets, and wrangled the troops to get us all from Chicago to Sanibel Island, Florida via Newark, New Jersey on People’s Express Airlines. I was the one who took more than the mandatory science and math classes because I thought it made me seem smarter.

And looking back to my younger years, I could see that I am still very much like I was in high school. I still plan the trips and organize the events. I still take on too much responsibility. This is me. This has always been me. When I was a teenager I felt too self-conscious, too different, to embrace this identity. But now I’m older. I’m wiser. I feel okay about who I am.

Over the course of the weekend, we all laughed with (and sometimes at) each other. My friends and sister playfully teased me for my over-planning and bossy approach. They grew irritated by my insistence that we create a shared album of the weekend on our iPhones. But it was okay. I could laugh with them because I wasn’t looking for my identity outside of myself anymore. Finally, after all these years I could see myself clearly. I could just be me.