When I swipe my card from the lanyard around my neck and enter the dorm under the canopy of trees, memories of summer camp flash briefly in my head. It’s different of course. I’m in a new campus, sure, but the urge to fit in merely sits on a fence almost out of my gaze, undulating its legs as it makes an occasional snide comment. As with the memories I’m told about these parallel quads, I hear but don’t really experience them.
I’m grateful for my first reunion to be someone else’s. While she introduces me as her partner, I can emotionally prepare for my own reunion, happening in a few weeks, and also develop some sympathy for when she becomes the outsider. It can be isolating, trying to fit in. But you remind yourself you need not try—your life isn’t here.
Hers was though, and still is. As you walk the grounds together, her grip on your hand tightens as she sees an old face, her body preparing to face a battle. For the past five years of nightmares and daydreams, she’s fought countless enemies with faces of the acquainted. They’ve gnawed at the parts of her who no longer exist but can still hurt, in her memories.
But the demons never appear. Genuine smiles and how-are-you’s fill the space where there ought to have been screams and brawls. A near decade of self-conscious imagination through a freshman’s lenses, shattered by the odd dullness of reality. They’re so happy, they say, to see you’re doing well. In fact, they add, they’ve been thinking for some time that they’re sorry for how they treated you.
Memories are snapshots frozen in time, while the world continues to turn. Reunion participants are a self-selecting group to be sure, but they’ve taught us that we don’t realize and can’t possibly know what’s happened to those photographed in our heads: that they’ve matured and grown, been pained and humbled, just as we have and maybe more so.
This is not to say that college students don’t cause irreparable physical or emotional harm to one another or that everyone should be forgiven. But there’s a tinge of anxiety in all of us I think, about going to reunions for fear of judgment or a repeat of drama from the past. The truth is that the caricatures in our head canon probably don’t exist anymore and perhaps never did. It can be scary to reveal, but your shoulders deserve a chance to no longer carry the weight of monsters under your dorm bed.