I So Had A Crush On You

Totally how I saw that conversation going at my reunion.

 

I am on Facebook a lot. I dont consider myself a Facebook stalker, as I often comment on posts and like photos, but I do my fair share of digging around every once in a while.  Today I hit the mother load. No joke. I found pictures of my junior high/high school crush. Yes. I. Did. I am willing to admit, I have searched his name once or twice to see whatever became of him, but I found nothing. Quite frankly, I didn’t really expect him to be a social media whore, so I wasn’t surprised that the search never returned any leads. Today, through a series of random Facebook posts (and the consultation of a yearbook), I found his wife who had posted pics of their adorable family. Bingo. Mystery solved.

It is surreal seeing people that you haven’t really thought about in the last 15 years. The image you have of your friends from high school seems to remain frozen until you run into them on campus, at the grocery store or at your reunion. Most people look pretty much the same. Very few people lost or gained 100 pounds…although, I venture to guess that most gained at least 20. Our hair is getting grayer, the hairline receding, the bags under our eyes are a bit more pronounced. The once youthful glow replaced by many late nights of binge drinking and illegal drug usage. The mischievous spark in our eye dulled by the 40 hour work week and paying taxes to the man. The passion and fire beaten into submission from the grind of bosses and management telling us how to do our job. Our creativity stalled, perhaps prematurely, by the needs of little kids with macaroni art and handprint turkeys.

I don’t mean to sound all depressing and sad, although that was not the most upbeat reflection of growing up. I guess I just mean the ideas and the plan that we had for ourselves at 16 are not always how things work out at 31. In some cases they are worse, in most cases they are far better than anything we could have imagined and almost all of the time they are completely different incarnations of ourselves; a new version of ourselves that we could have never really imagined when we were younger. We find new talents, new passions and new ideas that throw our lives into different paths, shaped by the choices we make when we are young. Where we go to college, which professors we have, where we land our first job, and sometimes as seemingly arbitrary as who sits in the desk next to us. In this crazy world, one small decision can set the butterfly effect into action- one tiny ripple that affects us for the remainder of our life time. Woah, this is getting deep.

Getting back to the point…he has gained weight. His hair isn’t as cool and he looks like any other dude on the street. Oh, well, at least my curiosity has been satiated.

And no, just like Taylor Swift…I will never, ever, ever, tell for whom my blog is about. Oh, well, screw that, message me and I will send you the picture. Haha!

xoxo