When people ask me where I "grew up" I don't say Lawrence, though I spent the first third of my life living there. Instead I name the town I lived in from ten to eighteen. But you notice that I haven't listed my high school on my page.



I only visit that town on the rarest of occasions, maybe once every couple of years now; though my first post-college job had me there every week for a year. The farther I get from age eighteen, the harder it is to go back there. When I do, I get this almost visceral feeling that I don't belong there, and I should go.



You probably think that I hated that town, but it's not true. There were some bad times and some bad people, but for the most part things were good... right up until I moved the morning after I graduated from high school. It wasn't my idea, but my parents sold the house and moved back to Massachusetts to care for my great-grandmother. She had Alzheimer's and couldn't live alone anymore. Having spent my teen years as my brother's babysitter instead of working some other menial after school job so my folks didn't have to put him in daycare, I couldn't afford not to go with them.



I didn't want to go. I didn't want to live with someone rapidly losing her mind. But most of all I didn't want to move over 100 miles away from friends the last summer before college. It took one awful year before my great-grandmother died, and another year and a half after that before we moved back to New Hampshire. I spent all that time desperately wishing that we'd move back "home."



We didn't, of course.



Though it wasn't easy, I kept in touch with a lot of people the first three years or so after we moved away. After that most of us drifted apart. That sort of thing happens.



Of course, now with the advent of the internet and places like classmates.com and here at myspace, I could probably reconnect with a lot of them if I wanted to. (if they wanted to, too, of course). Someday. Not yet.



I did a search for my high school and found lots of people from my school. I was surprised that one girl who had been very plain in middle school is now a knock-out at thirty; good for her! I was more surprised by the number of people who still live in that small town. One of my old friends even married a boy we went to high school with and has two kids with him. A friend of friends didn't end up with the jerk we all hated in high school, and I hope she's happier for it because we knew then she deserved better than him.



It's probably the fact that they're still there in that same little town that makes me hesitate to even say "hi" by sending them a message. Part of it is envy. People are often portrayed as feeling pity for those who never leave the town they grew up in, but some of us wish it had been us. Most of these people haven't moved seven times, and had to start over each time. There's something comforting in the idea of being in the same place always and knowing that it's your place in the universe. I've never really had that. They seem content, and I don't have that either yet...and I may never. I might always be someone who wants more.



The other issue is connecting with them again would bring on a serious case of the What Ifs? and that's a bittersweet indulgence. What if I never moved? What if I had the same friends through college and my twenties as I did when I was a kid? Those are kind of nice to think about. Then there are ones that are more about regret than anything, like what if I'd realized at seventeen what I did at twenty-three: that he uncontrovertibly wasn't the one after all? What if I'd paid more attention to a couple of nice guys I barely noticed in high school because I was so wrapped up in someone else? (neither of them popped up when I spied on old classmates) What if my brother and I turned out better and differently if we hadn't lived the lives back when everything changed twelve years ago? Of course, maybe everything could have been worse, too.



For the moment, I think I'm content to let the ghosts of the past lie. But maybe trying to go home again will someday feel better. We'll see.