Alumni Ball

“Let it go, brother.”

I find myself here every decade leading up to June, every decade in its sixth year. I admittedly feel ashamed of it, this, of it and my reaction to it. For someone who takes pride in having been able to embrace the “now” and enjoy it for what it offers as well as its quiet suggestion of a coming tomorrow and its possibilities, this- This short stretch at the aging end of spring in such years finds me fucking- Ugh! I can’t believe I find myself here, again, worried about- Ghosts. And at the end of this period, every ten years, as summer opens and gets steaming along, it occurs to me that, by my very thoughts and actions through it, that I’m the worst person of all, maybe, when it comes to digging up the dead and parading it about. I am, by nature, a sentimental fool, afterall; letting the past slip quietly backward into the tide of time can never be my strongest quality.

The Nevada town I finished growing up in boasts an annual alumni banquet and ball for graduates of its local high school about a week after the year’s graduation ceremony. By its nature, Lovelock cannot let time pass elegantly behind any better than I can manage to. The alumni association’s newest members – the town’s most-recent graduates – are spotlit, this night, although the weekend of the event is also traditionally when past graduating classes old their varying degree of reunions – five, ten, twenty-five, fifty… Whatever organizers in each group decide upon, whatever the group in its entirety – at least mostly – can confirm. Many celebrants remain in the area, though more happily make their way back to Lovelock, each June, to reunite with old friends and family members and to mistily reminisce on the locale’s better days. And, to an extent, theirs. A good number of these folks seemed to have peaked in their glory. This saddens me. What stirs upset within, however, is my suspicion that I’ve done the same. So, it’s at this time, each year – especially as the anniversary of my own high school graduation nears and passes – that it really hits me, how I’ve dropped life’s ball. But, I suppose that’s part of growing old: the acceptance of what we’ve come to regret up to then and how our choices have come to affect us. “Most-Likely To Succeed” – that’s what I was seen as by my classmates. “Funniest” and “Most-Likely To Succeed”. I don’t feel so funny nor successful, typing this while my hair is in business for myself, in these stinky loungeclothes, shoving palmloads of prescription medications into my gob and limping through the house like some broken-down old man. But I’m that – an old man and a broken one at that. To which I give a shrug. It’s the hand I drew. I’m just not too gaddamned pleased with how I’m playing it, how I’ve been playing this game, and my bitterness spills out onto this- This “seance table” of a sort I find myself, periodically, spilling bitterness onto the pristine memories of once-loved ones that perhaps unfairly match their real-life examples.

“You’ve gotta let ‘em go.”

I wonder on how those from my past, after having long-ago moved on from me, can periodically expect that I might like to pry myself out of my life to join them in a drunken weekend through our common spirit world. “Remember when-” and it’s, yeah, I do… I try to forget but it wakes me up, some nights, and now you’re aggrandizing it after exhuming it from what I’d hoped would be its resting place. I say that… But, when we have gotten together, I’m right in there, with the “Remember when?” and- Thing is, I’d years ago stopped taking calls from whomever wanted to drag out the Ouija board and, soon after, the calls stopped coming. Emails or messages on social media. I say I’m fine with this. Part of me is. There are some people I’d rather leave back there. However, I regret it that others couldn’t, for whatever reason or reasons, join me on this journey toward- I dunno. I dunno. People drift apart over long stretches of distance and time. People change on an elemental level, become unrecognizable to us but for some feature that reminds us of what we can actually recall of ‘em. It’s not fair for any of us to be expected to perform nostalgia acts for those who remember us for what once was, rather than the what is and what might be. One of my closest friends shut the door on me when I was lying in a hospital bed. “How did you fall so low?” were her last words to me before she retreated from my life. Though, in truth, we’d parted ways years and years before. There would be no pretense, after this, of two people corresponding back and forth on the Internet, no more cards and letters, no more nothing. How did I fall so low? I betrayed a sad smirk, then, in supposition that it was partially to get away from shit like this and we were done. It hurts, suspecting her assumptions of me, then, but that’s none of my business, somebody’s misconceptions of me. All I know is that, if one’s misconceptions overshadow the fact of you, it’s time to tip the fuck out the room.

My one-time best friend drunkenly impressed it upon me during an unexpected phone call, one night during COVID, that I’d never have been friends with her nor most anyone else we graduated with from PCHS had it not been for him. The statement pierced my heart. Mainly because I thought he was right. Truly, in the years since, in the decades since, it became rather apparent to me in his absence that he’d been a key to a certain gateway for me and- It’s “whatever”. After managing to get him off the line, that night, I went straight for the Internet and my social media accounts and started deleting fuckers here and unfriending others there. A handful remained, though contemporary sociopolitical differences pushed even them away. In the end, I was, like, it’s fine; you’ve made your choices, I’ve made mine. Life awaits. Onward. Still…

One old friend from back home who also lives in the valley, here, now and has since the end of high school sometimes drops me a note. These are tough days for people like us who want to meet our world in an ethical manner. She’s lost so many to her convictions – friends, family… It’s difficult for someone who’s never had the experience of spending formulative years in a small town to understand how tight it sews you into its fabric and, when the fabric’s torn, somehow, you’re ripped apart with it. We all had fever dreams of being friends forever, for success and having our children grow up together as friends, too, but- Life doesn’t always play out like a daydream. My biggest dream, now, is that I scrape together enough dough to cover the ambulance rides and hospital bills from the past year. On the positive, last week’s annual CT scan of my chest cavity shows no tumor regrowth since last year and each year preceding, following 2012’s thymoma excision, and I’m now “graduated” from the shit altogether! Here’s to no reunions for that.