ERT #1: On Yearbooks, Sand, and Recollections
Every year, around the first or second week of June, high school seniors around the United States partake of the traditional
ritual of receiving, reading through, and signing yearbooks. My time came in 2001. For all, it is an opportunity to try and bid
their somber goodbyes to each other as somberly, reminiscently, bittersweetly, and humorously as is possible to do in strokes of
ink on an autograph page. It is indeed a feeling that hits you straight in the gut when you realize that you will not see some of
these people ever again. The very idea that what you know now is the last thing you will ever remember about them is certainly
very unsettling. It doesn't matter whether you liked them, didn't like them, or never really cared for them; you may have known
them, or at least known who they were, for a very important portion of your life, if not for most of your life. There is a
certain — seemingly innate, even — connection that forever binds you to them simply because you graduated when they did, where
they did. Yes, you know there will be high school reunions every five years. But some of those people will, for some reason, be
it self-esteem, self-image, or otherwise, not go. And those people that do, you will see for, what, maybe a few hours, which is
hardly enough time to really "re-know" the people you've completely missed for five or ten years. So, once you leave those doors
after graduation ceremony, once you disperse from your graduation parties, that's really it. All that trouble to get to know
everyone, and — snap! — they've forever evanesced into that black hole, the one that exists everywhere beyond your own domain,
called the Real World. So that yearbook, with those messages of well-wishing, of memories great and small, and of valediction,
with those photographs of smiling countenances that will continue to fade further and further into time and space, with those
passages impossibly attempting to vacuum-pack four years of all their high-school memories and tributes into 1500 characters or
less, with all those seemingly insignificant items that will serve as our only triggers, our only nexuses between the "then" and
the "now"... that yearbook will undoubtedly be a treasured possession. You will look back and instantly recall the Dapper Dans,
the ditzes, the dorks, the dream dates, the dumbheads, and the duds, who made your life miserable, wonderful, and memorable. Six
months will pass, you'll look at the book and still feel like you know them pretty well. A year will go by, you'll start to wonder
where they are, how they're making out, if they've morphed into completely different people or if they're still just like you knew
them. A part of you will want them to change, while another part selfishly, but reasonably, will hope they're right where you left
off with them. Longer after you get the book, you'll start to feel a bit bad about those people you never really got to know, you'll
wish you had spent some more time with them. You'll start to feel a bit worse about those people you left on bad terms with, wishing,
hoping that you'll get a chance to smooth things out with them, not exactly easy with the prospect that they might forever hold you
for some petty thing you did or said to them some time ago that made them feel bad and for which you never really got to apologizing.
You'll feel the worst, though, about the people you really got to know well, the ones you became close with, the ones who feel as if
they're still smiling at you in their photos as they were when you last saw them, but haven't really been in touch with you since
and won't likely ever do so. They're the ones without whom you would have been nobody — and you really wish you could call them up,
or meet them in some café, or e-mail them... something, somehow. Just to tell them you miss them. Just to thank them infinitely.
Just to experience something of what you had then...
...and that is the essence of the high school yearbook. It isn't just some dusty volume you drag out of some box somewhere every
now and then to laugh about what you wore, how you spoke, what your hair looked like, who you had that crush on, how dreadfully
fake that teacher's hair was, way back whenever. It's the trigger. It's the one thing you look at that can set off a chain reaction
of instant recollections of when you were much different than you are — but it can just as easily remind you of how much you
haven't changed. And that's the beauty of that old high school yearbook. It is a reminder that, in essence, we are solely
and ultimately defined by who we have been, what we have done, where we were, not who we might be, what we could do, where we should be.
We cannot see the footprints we have yet to make. We know we will have to keep on trudging through the sand. But it is impossible to
proceed without pausing and turning around to see the immutable impressions we have cast in the archival sand behind us.
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