Today I feel like a party pooper. My mouth wrinkles are decidedly down and not even the thought of watching my favorite show tonight is making me feel any better. I want to be alone and I want to be out and about. I want to scream in aggravation, and I want to want to run through fields. Yet, grouchy Greta is all that seems to be around me today. I know what is wrong, but I don't want to admit it outloud.
See it all started about 23ish years ago. I was sick with a fever and I was in a fight with a friend. I was being dumped from the group for not being cool enough and I was spitting mad, and also, did I mention I had a very high fever? I was delirious. I wrote a quite flowery letter comparing said friend and the new friend that I was dumped for to Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Now it was stupid and ridiculous for me to 1. leave a note for my friend, 2. to compare her and this girl to Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, and 3. sealing doom on my high school years. I didn't want to be Baby in the corner (yes, that was a Dirty Dancing nod), and I knew that I would never be the cool one. I just wanted to exist and get the hell out of high school.
See I was not the type that wanted to be a cheerleader (no offense), or be Ms. Popular, my goal was to simply to survive my adolescent hell and get into university as quickly as I possibly could. However, all of that was derailed in a few moments of febrile idiocy that allowed me to "break" up my friendship of many years with a girl that I had been very close to. It was a hellish time and after a week of blackouts caused by fevers and being really sick, I returned to school forgetting that on the last day in school - and coincidentally, the day the fevers started and the day I wrote the stupid letter - I had written a really terrible letter. However, more than half the class was a mean as fire to me for months after I returned. If it wasn't for the girls on the softball team, I would have left the school. They convinced me that I should stick it out. Funny to think it was all caused by a letter. But one that forever forged a rift between my former good friend and I. And a letter that sealed my fate as having the worst sophomore year in high school history.
Now, why in the world would I be thinking about this now? And why would that one episode be coloring my day today all these years later? Fast forward through the rest of high school. Even though the incident was eventually brushed under the rug, it forever scarred me. I don't think any one involved remembers probably, but the girl I compared to Don Quijote, as leading the girls around and deciding who would do what, was loved by most of the class and she hated me. She tormented me the rest of the second year of secondary schooling and then was just plain snide and rude the rest of our time together. Small girls' schools with 42 classmates leave little room to hide. So, when I think of horrible days in high school her face pops up in my head and still brings a gasp to my throat - I have forgiven, but I am having a hard time with the forgetting piece. It is probably the one silly piece of baggage that I really bring with me from that time. But really, at 15 who doesn't want to just belong? Who wants to be the outcast? Who wants to feel like crap because of a stupid note written in a fit of stupidity? No one, that is who.
Tonight, there is a gathering of all the girls called together by my former tormenter. The invites were sent via Facebook weeks ago and though I received one, via someone else, I decided to politely decline. But now that we are one hour away from the event, I kind of am regretting it and kind of want to go to see everyone, not Ms. 'Tude, but the rest of our class. I just can't get myself to go out that door. So, instead, I am sitting here drinking a rather nice India Pale Ale from the Cisco Brewery in Nantucket and thinking...a terrible thing.
So, even though I am not there, here is my fav tune from that angst ridden times. Simple Minds. Simply divine.
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