drunk revelations from an event I swore to never attend

my 10 year high school reunion

I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming, Part 3 of my Friendship Serial (catch up here), to bring you a drunk at 2 am recap of my 10-year high school reunion.

For the record, I have neither edited nor even re-read this since I wrote it Sunday morning, and I do not remember what it says. I’ll find out when it lands in my inbox, as you’ve now found it in yours.

Apologies if I repeat myself in this preface, but I feel it’s important to provide some sober context for this experience…

I was unequivocally one of the least likely people to attend this particular function – save maybe only for that one kid who never spoke a word in 6 years and walked to and from campus every day on the side of the highway… we all thought he carried a gun in his backpack, but I digress – I spent most of high school trying to survive what was happening in my head and at home, so though my graduating class was quite small even by exclusive uptight private school standards, I probably could pick maybe 30 or so students out of a lineup.

I am not advocating for anyone to go to an event like this, because to each their own. High school itself was not a major player in my trauma, though it may have at times added to the pile. I feel like the list of attendees fits this description, too, based on what little I know about them.

Anyway, this is all just to illuminate the uncharacteristic nature of whatever is splayed out below.

I welcome questions in the comments to give more context or just more gossip, too!

Now onto the show…

Drunk thoughts at 2am from my 10 year high school reunion:

First, some very important context — I married my high school best friends older brother. It was unexpected and seemed like a summer fling at the time right as we were graduating high school, until it turned into a 10year relationship, bi-continental moves, two shared dogs, buying a house together, and then marriage. Oops.

Anyway, so said high school best friend, C, and I graduated in 2016 (really aging myself here but oh well). And at the time we were nearly inseparable. Co-editor-in-chief of our high school yearbook, besties, head of the yoga club (that didn’t actually exist), you get the idea.

Then at a post-grad week at the beach, I went on my first date with her brother, R. She knew, kind of, but it was quite a tale- for another time- but this is all to say, we graduated on the same day in June 10 years ago.

Also a story for another time but I was, troubled, as you may have gleaned from my other writing, in high school. I was undeniably a loner- oh I had my friends and was involved on paper- but I graduated with 144 people in my class, and I think I could pick 30 or so out in a lineup.

I am your stereotypical anti-candidate for reunion attendance at any age. But somehow, my sister in law/ former best friend was on the planning committee for just this occasion and I ended up facing a very uncomfortable two text exchange and two years of subsequent grief- or two hours in an awkwardly lit and empty restaurant in our home town with 40 people I went to high school with, and many not on my lineup list.

Needless to say, I was anxious. Not to mention, C and I haven’t had a real conversation in several years ourselves. And here we are, playing dress-up like nothing has changed since 2016.

We end up being the first people there, equally a nightmare, and head straight to the bar. You do not get through a night like this sober.

(and for those of you who have noted themes of sobriety in my previous work, I was sober for a very long time purely out of personal choice and preference, not due to dependency or problem…. So now i go in and out of phases with drinking probably for better and for worse.)

Pinot grigios in hand, C and I go greet some of the first people to show up. C was much more sociable in high school than I was. At some point in this night I asked her how many of the current attendees she had kissed. More than 20%.

So no surprises as people smiled somewhat unknowingly at me and then gave C big hugs with enthusiasm. This neither bugged me nor surprised me.

We end up in a conversation with my best friend, M’s, two exes, one who was on C’s kiss list, for a little too long for comfort. 10 years may have passed but we’re still us, right?

We make the rounds and by person number 5, I have talked to more of my classmates in my 20s than I ever had in the 20 years we spent together prior. No matter. The wine cures all.

A girl I used to know well - in the 3rd grade - is there and I go up to her, emboldened by adrehnaline and alcohol, and tell her I see her on social media from time to time and think she is so cool.

“Oh that’s all fake" she tells me in mock humility.

“All social media is” I reply.

But then she goes on to tell me, I think unexpectedly candid herself, that she had been rereading my instagram captions and thinking about how I am a really good writer.

Fuck ya, best compliment. Love her.

Then C and I move on to strike up a conversation with my another former friend of mine from my bus in 3rd and 4th grade. She is undeniably the coolest in the room but it’s clear it wasn’t effortless.

I hug her uncomfortably and we have the same comcersation I’ve already had with all of these other losers… “where do you live?” “What do you do for work?”

Like a $250K education couldn’t buy any of us an original thought.

Glass of wine no.3 and suddenly these faces seem less threatening. I’m reminding two boys that we once got burritos together in freshman year of college and taking a hit off of a girl I played Barbie’s with but haven’t talked to in 15 years’ vape.

“I have become the biggest stoner.” She tells me as I am coughing at whatever the fuck I just inhaled.

Then shit gets surreal. Like I am having an out of body experience acting as a version of myself that is undeniably attempting to mask my uncomfortability and intoxication.

It does a pretty good job because suddenly…

I’m bubbly.

I’m chatty.

I’m telling stories.

I’m fitting in.

I end up in a conversation with M’s former friend group (M and I were somehow best friends without ever really having the same friends), a group of girls I always thought were hierarchically above me in high school.

A girl, the girl, M asked me to talk to when she suspected this girl too of developing an eating disorder. (a bit more on her in a story to be released soon)

She’s telling me about fucking 57 year old men and how apparently the nerdiest guy in our grade is now hot shit to all of the single girls here tonight. And I’m nodding and laughing along like I’ve always belonged here. Like I had the potential in me all along to be less than the outcast I was in high school.

Buuuuut, I don’t. Because her laugh is fake, her lifestyle scares me, and I’m pretty sure she’s high on coke. I’m nodding along but I’m thinking about my bed and what my husband is doing and when the last time I got this drunk was and she’s thinking about DW.’s dick and telling me how fucked up she got last night.

And I’m laughing with her like there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

I see C is stuck in a conversation about the love lost between a boy who she has formerly made out with and his current gf who he lives with. He doesn’t love her, but should he tell her?

Duh.

And C is clearly uncomfortable and her other former ex won’t leave her alone and I’m having an extremely weird conversation now with the former love of M’s life who I used to be insanely jealous of for stealing her from me (drama queen party of 1) and I’m telling him what hot shit she is now (because he’s only ever dated girls that look just like M since they broke up and he recently got engaged) and M is definitely not hot shit but I love her and fuck him because I remember the day he broke her heart. I remind him how I slapped him in the 6th grade, something M has never let me forget, because he was being insufferable and wouldn’t give me my folder back and what’s an 11 year old girl to do in these conditions.

C and I finally make eye contact and I give her a pleading look to get me the fuck out of here because the alcohol may be talking for me now but I still know I’ve had about all of this crowd I can handle for at least the next 10 years.

I’m 6, and I’m 16, and I’m 28 all at once so basically I have no idea what is going on here and if we don’t leave now I’m going to lose my shit.

C and I are ubering home and saying sweet things to each other that we probably mean but will be too ashamed of to talk about again in the morning. We were best friends how the fuck did a man, who just so happened to be the love of my life and her brother, end up getting in our way.

We get home and C’s mom, my mother in law is awake still and hovering around as C putters to make us pasta considering all we ate for dinner were 3 focaccia squares because oh wait- our reunion was in a bread factory of all places.

C (and R’s) mom is intense. One of those women you know you’ll never get it right with. She only likes me because I’m quiet and flattering as a default whenever she’s near. C is eyeing me like “can she just fucking go to bed” and eventually she does in time for C’s dad, also an absolute wild card of a man, gets home from work.

He looks in the fridge, mutters about how he guessed he just won’t eat today, pours himself a drink, and then excuses himself for bed. Ozempic got him and it shows.

C and I go up to her room which I haven’t been in since senior prom and she’s revealing some of her family woes to me — a first.

I’m drunk as shit but keeping up with her and encouraging her. Trying to show her she’s not alone by telling her similar stories about how R feels about their family and how it breaks my heart.

But trying not to take it too far because our newfound camaraderie is tenuous and C can be unforgiving if you push her too far.

And then we parted ways. Me to sleep in her brother’s bedroom that I was once scolded at by their mom for being inside of at all.

I’m washing my face and thinking about the former versions of me that might wake up tomorrow and be ashamed to face what drunk current me said or did, and then quietly realizing I didn’t do anything but exist for once in a crowd of people I used to be unable to be seen by — to the point of physical illness.

What a wild and wonderful thing to exist here on this earth. And to experience that living in infinite ways that you never expected.

I almost didn’t make it out of high school alive. But here I am, like my tattoo says, living despite (and, I’d now argue, in spite) of it all…

This is a raw, unedited and unfiltered drunk take on one of the weirdness nights of my life.

Here’s to finding healing in spontaneous moments a decade later.

-June

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