Just one of those things

So I'm sitting here, glued to the computer, about an hour after bed time, just tiddling about.

I had read a wonderful email from a former classmate (several times removed, she was in a different sorority, but we were in the same year, and lived on the same campus. You know, we saw each other in the cafeteria sometimes...), all sentimental and nostalgic about how she'd gotten a job at the school we once went to (she went there far longer than I did), and how the ghosts of her memories haunted her.

I was tempted to post back about how I had once felt that way, about fifteen years ago. How I would wander around campus, missing my old chums, wondering where everyone was, and why I was even there. Now, twenty years after I left (give or take), I return to that campus to enjoy the silence, appreciate the architecture, study in the library (I still can't be as productive anywhere but where I created grand and silly opuses as a teen). I've created new memories there, made new friends. I go there to detox, to get work done, to smell the air (and listen to the geese flying south in the pre-autumn silence of the town).

I didn't tell her though. Because our memories were so different. Because she spoke fondly of people I never knew, never met. Because she simply got to experience so much more of that than I did. She had belonged, done her time, qualified for her nostalgia. I was just a wanna-be that lived so close by I could frequently visit.

It's kind of heartbreaking still that I ran out of money and had to leave college before I could graduate. After all these years I am still devastated. It's as if someone I loved, someone I'd planned for and expected to be a big part of my life, had died unexpectedly. Leaving a big hole, changing the course of my days, of my self completely, and leaving me forever half-finished. People to this day are stunned that I have no degree. They wonder why I don't just finish.

I don't just toss off a degree because it would not be worth it. It would not be the same. Now I am cynical, jaded, critical of the process (now that I have created and taught my own courses, now that I have taught professors how to teach my courses). I can't just get credits to get credits. It was never about that for me. It was the learning experience, whole hog. The people, the classes, the learning, and well, mostly the people. The classmates, the professors. I can teach myself from books or online, I do that all the time. I wanted the experience. I *still* want the experience.

I can't get excited about finishing my degree. That experience closed for me long ago. Now it will just be a stubborn, empty exercise. I will be just be going through the motions. I am too busy, too tired, too distracted, to bother with such a hollow waste of money. I don't even think I'd do it if someone paid me. It would just be more bitter than bittersweet.

But, because time is a bitch, I am getting to watch my classmates, those who got to finish, slowly trickle back to my alma mater, my vacationland, as employees. As, once again, people who unequivocably belong. As I don't, and probably never had. I get to read their heartfelt letters of gentle sorrow, as they cope with working at the place where so many critical memories were made. Like growing up to be a counselor at the camp where you spent the best summers of your life.

Ironically you really can never go back, no matter how easy it is to drive there. The place it once was is gone. And my friend (if I can call her that) is now having to make peace with how the past overlays the present, until soon, current memories will take the edge off those sharp nostalgic images. Then she will become bored, cynical, and jaded about the place, just like everyone does about where they work.

Or maybe you can go back, but not often and not for long. Not unless you are willing to let those old memories fade. She has to work there now. It will, sadly, never be the same in a way the most of us just can't understand.

Of course, I don't know if I count as most of us. I have been haunting the place like a ghost for about twenty years. I never belonged, I never finished, and I just keep getting drawn back; to watch spring rise over the hills, watch summer cook the lawns, and watch autumn drive away the geese. To just appreciate the natural, changing beauty of the place. In a way, it could be that I appreciate it like those who got to graduate never could. To really see it's value, its virtues, and never take it for granted because it's hard to take for granted what you have never quite had. I can't go back to something I never really had, I just keep going back to the place where it almost happened. It's so pretty there, so serene.

I am honored and a little baffled that I was on her mailing list of classmates and friends for her nostalgic email. I am not sure she realizes how sad it makes me that I can not ever, ever commiserate with her. I never had any close relationships or chance meetings with my professors. I don't expect anyone from the past to be coming around the corner. The place has been filled with strangers for decades now. No one I know, no one who knows me. It is a place that makes me feel safe, calm, peaceful, alone. Filled with trees, hills, and wind. It is a place that is a shadow of the campus so filled with potential long ago. It rarely echoes of loss or disappointment anymore. I had to come to terms with that ages ago.

I wish her luck in her attempts to reconcile the past with her current situation. Both she and the school have changed, and I hope that both live up to her expectations.