Class of ’91

If you ask almost anyone over the age of 25 to recount their high school experience, they'll hem and haw and say some pretty standard stuff. But give them enough time to keep a running monologue going, and eventually they'll say something like this:

"What I hate is how everyone says high school is the greatest time in your life. That is such bullshit. I mean, I don't think I had it really bad or anything, not like Columbine kids, but it sure as hell wasn't the best time of my life."

The real bullshit is that almost no one actually says high school is the greatest time in a person's life anymore. Most people default to college, if they went. Parents often say that the best part of their lives were the developmental years of their children. In fact, the real status quo answer the high school question seems to be to reflexively say it wasn't the best time in life. It's like breaking up with someone and saying, "It's not you, it's me."

I just wish I could evaluate my own high school experience.

After I graduated in 1991 from Shiloh High School in suburban Atlanta, my parents moved to Orlando, Florida. I moved to Statesboro, Georgia, ostensibly, which is where I have been for the better part of the 16 subsequent years since I graduated from Shiloh. In the course of those 16 years, I lost touch with every single person I held dear in high school. Because of that, I have fewer specific memories of 1987-1991 and more general ones. It's like recounting the details of a movie you once knew well, but haven't seen in a dozen years.

Then came the Internet. With MySpace, I've reconnected with one old Shiloh friend and caught up with another's life. I've seen pictures of grown-up people I only knew as teenagers. I've seen their children and occasionally read about their lives through blogs.

Yesterday, I found the woman who as a teenage girl was probably my most sincere, dear friend. I'm not sure I ever told her that, but when you are 18, you think you'll know people forever. Like most of my high school memories, my impressions of her are mostly vague—but less so than other parts.

I know that while in high school I was truly, deeply in love once (as only a teenager can be—but that's pretty pure stuff); I had one crush so intense that when I think about it, my stomach still gets butterflies (not because I hold a candle or anything, but because the emotive memory is more powerful than any specific recollections about this crush); I had a high school sweetheart my senior year; I went to prom, just once; I was in the drama club; I was moderately cool in my clique.

Since Shiloh, almost everything about me has changed. Reading my old friend's blog, almost nothing about her has changed. And while I am essentially living the same life I did 16 years ago (except that now I pay the bills and I am engaged (which should change everything)), she is a parent with a completely different life than when we were friends. Yet she remains more like the person she was in high school (at least as far as I can glean from her writing) than I could ever be.

It's hard to say if high school was the best time of my life. I'd like to think that the best time of your life is always the next day. What occurs to me now is that how good your life is at any point might have less to do with what you are doing than it does with how true you remain to yourself. Sound cliché? Well, you didn't know my friend—then and now. And while I have only blog entries to go by, a real writer has a voice as distinctive as any singer's. My friend's voice hasn't changed. It's just gotten sweeter.