Moving Forward, Looking Back

I recently attended my 25th college reunion.  It feels like yesterday - and forever ago - when I called Rhodes’ campus home.  There are things I miss - more that I don’t miss: looming due dates, cafeteria meals, community bathrooms, math, and my hopelessly romantic notions about love.  The last one lingered long past graduation but started to lose luster after divorce number two. 

That’s the thing about reunions - everyone shows up with more chapters to their story.  Close friends know each other’s highs and lows and those on the periphery are happy to catch a glimpse or better yet, hear a juicy bit.  Some people look and act the same and others have become something other than what you remember.  Either way, the one thing everyone has in common is that something - visible or not - has changed: age, health, career, geography, relationship status, kids…dreams.  I wasn’t the only one who imagined life would look different than it does now.

I don’t know what snippets of my life people have come to know over the past 25 years -and it doesn’t matter.  None of their perception about who I was then or who I am now changes what I know about me.  It’s no secret that I carry sadness about turns my life has taken and uncertainty about where it’s headed - but none of it outweighs the gratitude I feel for where I’ve landed. 

I found the poem below on the heels of my trip.  It’s perfectly timed for Halloween, but even more so for anyone who has ever strolled down memory lane with a sigh and come back to the life they’re in with a smile.

Dressing Up for Myself

This costume isn't for the street,
No plastic mask or painted grin.
It's just for me, inside the room,
To try on who I might have been.
A velvet-cloaked and daring witch,
Who owns the power of her spell.
A weary ghost, whose story's heard,
And finally, can say farewell.
A monster patched and stitched together,
From pieces found in broken pasts.
A frankenstein of former loves,
With scars that tell how long it lasts.
The mirror shows a hundred faces,
Each one a version I forgot,
But as I shed them, one by one,
I find the self I hadn't sought.
This shedding is the real parade,
The deepest, truest masquerade.
(Author Unknown)