ZEN Bitchin'

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.

I didn’t attend that reunion or any other gathering related to my high school batch. No one probably knew how to reach me. After all, I (along with my family) left Bulacan after my high school graduation to settle in Manila. My father stayed with his job in the province for a good few years. I think I went to Bulacan only twice while I was studying. And one of the reasons why I did was just to hook up with someone I used to regularly fooled around with. When that proved unsuccessful, my interest waned. I would hear news on my old school from another alumnus, who graduated 2 years ahead of me and ended up marrying my uncle. She kept in touch with her high school friends. Some of these friends are elder siblings of my classmates so I would hear news about them too. I feigned interest but remained indifferent deep inside.

But, was high school really as bad as I like to picture it? This is a question that I hadn’t asked myself before, to tell the truth. Lately, I have to accept that our memory can play tricks with our emotions. Memories are, at best, tenuous and fleeting, always affected by external factors, and never truly accurate as, let’s say, a photograph. In all honesty, I can attest that my feelings about high school are true. If there is a part of my life that I have no intention of doing again, it will be my 4 years at Saint Paul’s School in San Rafael, Bulacan, hands down. I would like no more of those social missteps, the failures & frustrations, and the uninformed choices that defined my early adolescence.

Still, my contact with G brought on a rush of happy memories of high school. Small memories, actually, but happy nonetheless. And there were things about high school that made me happy. Teachers I genuinely liked. The nuns. The work I did for the school paper. They won’t be enough to dispel my opinion of high school, but enough to make me realize that like everything in life, there were good parts that went with the bad ones in my high school life. Makes no sense in looking at my high school life with disdain. Recognizing this reality will help me look back on high school with a more sympathetic perspective. Maybe, in doing so, it will also help me forgive myself for my past trespasses in high school, which were probably done in an unsuccessful attempt to gain leverage and, eventually, social acceptance within that microcosm called high school.

I was too young; I didn’t know any better.