Nostalgia - 5/22/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Today in the afternoon I got really zonked out. I felt very tired and introverted and odd. Because I was feeling tired, I decided to take the bus to my old middle school and then walk to work, because it is a shorter walk that way. Because I was feeling odd, when I got off the bus I stood and looked at my old middle school for a while, and then decided to go inside. What the hell, I had half an hour to kill.

It was bizarre. It looked completely different from what I remembered. The doors were the wrong color. So were the lockers. The windows were the wrong size and shape. The hallways were too small. Everything was in the wrong place.

I found my way upstairs, somehow, to my eighth grade team hallway. I caught sight of my old math teacher, who didn't look like my old math teacher. I went into my old English classroom. (Too small. Not enough windows.) My old English teacher was talking to another teacher, so I just stood and looked at stuff on the wall for a while, waiting for her to notice me. Eventually she did. She just said, "Aidan."

I said hi.

We had a "so what college are you going to" conversation. She said that she had recently found my old end-of-the-year portfolio.

"The one with all the reflections?"

"Yes."

"That I was really sarcastic about the whole way through?"

"Yes." She smiled.

"Oh."

"So do you still hang out with some of the same kids?" she said.

"Yeah... pretty much the same people. Like uh..." I listed names. She only recognized some of them. When I said "Tom Rousseau" she burst out laughing.

"So how much school do you have left?"

"Three days."

"Three days," she said.

Things went about the same way with my eighth grade social studies teacher. Then I went out into the hallway again and I realized why things were all wrong: in my head, all of my middle school memories take place in the high school. I have just taken the high school building and projected it onto my middle school memories, because I stopped remembering what the middle school looked like. And then I realized that I'd done that with people too - in my memories, everyone looks like they do now. Even Tom. In my middle school memories he has long hair and a beard and wears tie-dyed shirts. This makes a lot of my memories not make that much sense.

But when I went into the hallway outside of the social studies room where we all used to hang out for extended periods of time, it hit me. The real thing, as it was. All of a sudden, I saw us. I saw an awkward girl with dark shoulder length hair and wire frame glasses and another one with blond hair and a duct tape purse, and a pale, pimply kid saying things too loudly and wearing pants that were too short for him, and a chubby kid in orange laughing at his jokes, and a very gangly boy standing at the edge of the group not saying much. And everybody else too, who I don't see anymore. Jenn and Maya and Cassandra and Elijah and that weird Japanese girl who didn't talk, just smiled. And Adam. And Emma. (She came into Bruegger's the other day. I avoided eye contact.)

There we were, standing in the hallway laughing.

A little girl with braces and glasses that gave her googly eyes ran down the hallway and almost knocked into me. I snapped out of it.

After that I got the strong urge to go down and find out what the hell I had written on our mural. At my old middle school, every eighth grade class got a mural, and every eighth grader got to write something on it. I didn't even remember what our mural was or where it was. I finally found it - music notes. It was music notes coming out of a boom box. Everybody got a music note. It was next to the library. I looked and looked for mine.

I could not find it. Finally I just had to go to work. I would be late.

It's still bugging the hell out of me that I have no idea what I wrote there. I remember I agonized over it.

By the time I left the school, it was familiar. I could remember things taking place there. I could remember when it was home. And I started to miss it a little, even.

Work was unpleasant because I got into a mini-fight with the new manager over his incompetence. We have a new manager. Pat's benevolent reign has ended. Sigh. It was too good to last.

I finished that song. I am still definitely not entirely satisfied with it. But I guess I don't entirely hate it either. I feel a sort of affection towards it even though it frustrates the hell out of me. That I didn't get it right. I couldn't get it right. It's... Gragh.

I wrote out seperate parts for Jack and Julian. I did Julian's first. This is when it occured to me that maybe it should have a title. This is the imaginary title that I came up with: "The song that is probably for or about you, but you don't know it, and therefore it is creepy that I am asking you to play it."

This is the title that I wrote: "The song that I wrote for theory."

I should go to bed. It is too late for coherence.