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It had to happen eventually. That dreaded contact from someone in my deepest, darkest past that starts with, “You may not remember me but we went to high school together...”
The 20 year high school reunion is happening in a few months. I should have seen it coming. The plethora of friend requests in Facebook from people I went to school with over the last few weeks were the biggest clue.
It wasn't until the invitation arrived in the mail that I started to truly reminisce about the time that is supposed to have been “the best days of our lives”.
Twenty years since I had seen these people. At least 15 since I had seen any of them in the street. Three countries, five states, eight cities, 29 suburbs, six careers and countless lovers have come and gone since these people were in my life. That, to me, sounds a lot better than just plain old twenty years.
I look at the faces of my old schoolmates, all essentially the same, just older now. They are Mums and Dads now. The girls seem to have a thing for decoupage and scrapbooking, while most of the guys have gotten fat. At least I'm not the only one! Most of them are still living in the same suburb we grew up in. A few have gone overseas, and according to an email, a couple have died well before their time. Not one of them is gay though.
Twenty whole years have passed by and I am still the one who doesn't fit in. But it's been twenty years now. Surely things have changed.
After all, it's twenty years since I was given an award in front of nearly three thousand students at my high school for winning multiple national gold medals in athletics whilst representing them, only to have a group of them yell “faggot” as the medals were placed around my neck.
It's been twenty years since I had tried to make my mark by taking my chances at singing at a talent show only to have another group yell “faggot” as I was given the first prize.
That's the same twenty years since I had been so terrified to go to the boy's toilet for fear of being bashed that I ran across the road and pissed in a neighbour’s garden.
And yes, it's been a whole twenty years since I had felt the need to run, swim, lift weights, play sport, study and perform myself into a nervous breakdown to try and win some respect from them, only to find that an over-achieving faggot is still just a faggot.
I wish I could rock up to that Reunion like Romy and Michelle, tell them all that I had invented Post-Its and dance under a spotlight to Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time only to be flown away at the end of the function in a helicopter by the one guy who all this time never admitted that he too was gay and had a crush on me, but who is now not only proud of it, but was the inventor of the rubber that is used on the soles of tennis shoes the world over. It's entirely possible. After all, twenty years of moisturising and grooming has put me well ahead of the rest of the boys from my year.
But that was all from a movie I rented out a decade ago. The reality is that I don't want to see these people. Even with their kids, their mortgages and their older, wiser approaches to life, I only remember them as the same people who made my life a living hell at high school.
I do wish I could smile at the guys who beat me up and called me a “dirty poofter” daily until I actually believed that I was nothing but a loser with a dirty secret who deserved to die. I do wish I could trade pie recipes with the girls who are now mothers of 2.5 children and forget that their words back then were perhaps the cruellest of all. I wish I could just blot out all the bad memories and only remember the good times I had at high school.
Unfortunately there weren't enough of them worth remembering.
And although I am a harder, stronger and more able man than I was back then, I am still gay. And no man bears a grudge like the gay man. The bitch within me has no desire for reconciliation, friendship or forgiveness. But with that said, I would have liked to have been the bigger man about this whole reunion thing and just enjoy a few drinks with a bunch of people who were probably every bit as scared of being teenagers as I was.
Unfortunately I have already posted back the RSVP with the words, GO FUCK YOURSELVES written on it in permanent red marker.
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