High School Revisited

Maybe it was no accident that my high school graduation song is the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s theme, Someday. The song sings of hope, that someday indeed, things can be different – will be different, can and will be better. I wonder how many of us realized that when we sang it the day we officially left high school. Has “someday” arrived for some of us yet?
Having had two pseudo-reunions, I had no chance of asking this of any of my classmates. Something always held me back. During these reunions, there’s a feeling of camaraderie that was absent back when we were in high school. People ask each other how they’re doing knowing that back then, these same people only talked to you to ask if the teacher had indeed said that there was an exam scheduled for today. Maybe I am being a tad too harsh. Some are genuinely interested in how the other half lives, but I can’t help but think if these reunions are a way to touch-base to the time when things were not as complicated as they are now. Of course, I can’t fault the organizers for that. I wanted to somehow recreate that time, too. High school was like a preview of this period known as “The Time Of Your Life”. But only if you weren’t miserable that time.
Generally speaking, here in the Philippines high school was not the worst years of our lives. Even if one wasn’t popular or had few friends, it wasn’t the torture frequently portrayed in Hollywood movies. Sure, all the awkwardness and the mishaps of adolescence seem to be packed in four years, but it happened to everyone so we all had pretty much the same entries on the “Most Embarrassing Moments” List. Some were jocks (basketball, volleyball), some belonged to the popular crowd (the requirements were pretty vague, but I knew you had to know the lyrics to the top ten songs played on MTV), some were in the fringes of the popular crowd, and some were just there. In a population of 75 in the graduating class, we pretty much knew everyone else. But of course with callowness of youth, there were times that some had to be excluded to make room for the popular ones. I don’t think we were terribly cruel when we were young. Or maybe I just didn’t think that we were and that we really were. As they say, teen-agers are the cruelest creatures in the planet.
Looking back on all those years, they seem to be so far away from who we are now. Of course, I can’t speak for the whole class. Some of us have settled down and became adults. Some of us are still a little bit lost – trying to find our way around this big, bad world. Maybe that’s it. When we were in high school, we used to think that the world – our world was so small and we couldn’t wait to get out of it. And then came college. It was pretty scary, but exciting too. For some of us, it was a chance to start with a clean slate. For the others, it was there for us to continue what we had begun. But for all, it was another adventure. And we sure didn’t come out unscathed.
The first sem break I came home, everyone was in a dither trying to organize what could pass for a reunion. A lot of people attended, but not a lot has changed. We all had fun recounting how college treated us. Everything was still new and we had not encountered anything life-changing. Yet. The following school breaks were not occasions for reunions anymore. It seemed as if reminiscing about high school took a step back to actually living the life we already had. College had either overwhelmed us or we were actually doing a bit of growing up and wanted to leave high school behind.
To me, it looked like they were people who went out of their way to prove that they were adults. In the end, it just proved that all of us still needed a lot of growing up to do. I guess high school makes you realize that yeah, you had fun three-four years ago, but life goes on. And it can’t be necessarily bad.