Something remarkable happened to me a couple of days ago. I was logged in Facebook, looking at the wall of status updates of my friends. A name popped up in a friend’s status update comments. A blast from the past. Before I could control myself, I directed a question to her, asking if she, by any chance attended my high school. Turned out that she was indeed the one I thought of. If memory serves me right, she was a transferee from Bacolod, a place that the rest of us that time must have considered exotic, being land-locked Bulakenyos who probably considered Luzon as the only part of the country that mattered.
After this initial contact, she invited me to peruse her profile so I could get in touch with our other classmates. And before the euphoria faded away, I did exactly just that. I stifled a groan when I saw that she had 500+ friends. How was I supposed to get through this list? But about 90 minutes (and a blooming migraine) later, I have seen the many names that populated my young life. However, out of the 30+ names I saw in her profile, I only managed to click about 3 other names.
I have previously written how I felt about my unremarkable years in high school. Of course, when one hears that I graduated from high school at age 14, he or she wouldn’t agree right away that it was an unremarkable 4 years. But to be honest, that’s really how it was. If anything, the only remarkable things in my high school life were how socially inept I were, the sense of alienation that I felt (which never lifted until after my second year at university, and my utter lack of friends. If I were going to use my present definition of friends, I’d say that I only made one true friend in high school. And I never contacted him again since going to Manila a few weeks after graduating from high school. I saw him only 10 years later, by accident, while I was dining with my boyfriend at a restaurant. We were cordial with each other; he seemed excited about a supposed high school reunion that was going to happen in a few months. I feigned excitement when he mentioned the reunion, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t be bothered to return to a place where I existed virtually invisible–always on the fringes, on the outside looking in the beautiful and popular ones.
Last I heard, J is dead. I remember he had a congenital heart defect. In fact, in our senior year, he got sick and almost died, about the time we had our annual spiritual retreat.
