Is it easier this way?

my chucks and an old jacket, really, I don’t know why I bother

~

To be from the outside looking in, I mean. Being the proverbial voyeur, I mean. Kinda fucking lonely, maybe, but is it any easier? To be part of, but not really?

Went to my high school last weekend, where I spent maybe the four most confused years of my life. Had to watch my sister perform in a dance production, one of the ‘rites of passage’ of my school, meaning, it’s something you don’t want to do but have to do anyway.

While I was seated at the audience I noticed how much things have changed and not changed, something I always say when I look at the relics from my past. More importantly, I looked at everything with a tinge of irritation, because I now know how much I detest such kinds of rituals, and amazement, too, because I have come to realise how much smaller my world really is back then, how my world fucking revolved among trivial things.

For all the pain and drama high school life has wrecked, I wonder how much it has to do with character building. My own character building, if you think about it. Vittorio bases his judgment of some people we meet upon the high school where they came from. I somehow see the sense in this because you actually grow up during the high school years. University life is just something to fill the in-betweens; it’s what you do after eventually finding out what you want and don’t want, it’s how you find similar people like you, how you continually steer clear of people you don’t like, how you totally feel like you’re living in the ‘real world’ when the real world fucks you up immediately after you finish your degree. University life is what you do to bridge your way to get to the other side, the more ‘adult’ life, where everything is as fucked up as high school, but with less drama. In high school, yes, we were all so fucking young, but it’s how we got old, too, don’t you think?

But I’m digressing. For all the pain and drama high school life has wrecked, I wonder if it was all worth it. So much can happen emotionally in four years, especially if your world is so damn small. And coming back to that small world, years later, I wonder how I am, really. I wonder how we all are.

From my seat I saw random faces, some familiar to me, some I have a gut feeling that I am friends with before but I can hardly remember their names. I wonder why they are all here again, I wonder if they have a sister like me, forced to endure such frivolous display of nothingness.

This is the only thing I can think of: one thing about high school, more so, an exclusive school for girls, or, even more sinister, an exclusive, Catholic school for girls, is that search for a stamp of approval. Years later, girls from my high school come back, some wearing university jackets, some bringing along their boyfriends, some wearing business suits, some carrying designer bags, some dangling car keys from their fingers, some holding a cigarette, some speaking in a foreign language, all waving an imaginary flag: here I am, do you approve? Look at me, see how I’ve changed, don’t you think it’s wonderful?

A lot of girls, they do that. Even when I was still studying, I’d see former students walking in hallways, displaying their new selves, their new lives, for all to see. It’s as if to say: hey, I’m successful now, hey, I can do this now, hey, I am this now. It just mystifies me if this is to mock the alma mater or if this is to ask for that approval that eluded us back when we were still young girls wearing uniforms. The Catholic nuns were not keen on enigmatic and charming women, they’ve always wanted cunt-less personas loitering the halls. And the guilt, oh the fucking guilt that they’ve all made sure we carry for the rest of our lives. We can’t escape the fucking guilt.

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know where I’m headed with this observation. I just noticed that I picked my best clothes before I went to school, made sure that I looked, well, ’successful’. I also realised why I felt so icky the whole time I was at school.

Because everything was a joke. There was, of course, that strange pull to look for old teachers, mingle with old classmates, see how everyone is doing, update them on what is going on with my life. But I resisted that. If I could have run away from everything, I would have. Because everything is a joke.

I learned a lot but I never wanted to come back. Do you know that feeling? Of never wanting to come back, I mean? Of settling for being on the outside, looking in?