things I have forgotten to tell you

I never hated high school the way others did. Nor did I think it was the greatest. Most of my days I waded in a shallow pool of happiness - I did well in school, had good friends, and boyfriends that were more friends than any kind of combustible love affair that left me either breathless or in ruins. Most of high school I treated as a time to get through, to put up with until real life started, when I would feel things more strongly and life would be more than surface level.

So going to my 10 year reunion this weekend was an extension of that status quo I felt growing up. It was vaguely nice seeing people -though the people I really wanted to see I've already kept in touch with. I had one really good conversation with a girl who I haven't kept in touch with, who I spent many an afternoon with writing letters as part of the high school's Amnesty International club, who has a chicken farm and who asked me for advice on how to deal with a mother who just found out she has cancer. Other than that, I enjoyed the whiskey more than the conversation.

Really, what last night proved to me was that I think I made the most out of my time at a high school in the conservative suburbs and was right to always want to, and to finally, leave there. And it's nice to return every 10 years, to see the people whose faces used to populate your every day, and say I'm happy to see you're doing well. That you have pretty children, fun stories about yoga in L.A., are practicing environmental law in D.C. And then I'm happy to leave and return to a world where I feel more free and everything is scarier and more poignant and I cry and laugh with equal enthusiasm. Where when I say I have loved Morocco and Wyoming more than anywhere else, or I want to live in Alaska, people do not ask why.

no one, not even the rain, has such small hands

i live under blankets these days, hibernating with tea and pumpkin pie and candles are everywhere and i can't stop writing love letters to autumn and everything smells like cloves and the light is always beautifully waning. changes in seasons of course make me remember all the times i've danced in leaf piles, mashing bits of yellow leaves into my hair, giving my hands permanent grass stains. six years ago emile said i love you for the first time just after i jumped into a leaf pile and spun and spun until i ran into him and it was so late at night and i was leaving for wyoming in a matter of days and everything was so happy and so sad and there was such finality in that beginning. thanksgiving, six years ago, i thought i was saying goodbye to the person who i thought was going to be my biggest loss. there was my first thanksgiving in college, when we all stayed in wisconsin, these new friends who became my family, and stuffed ourselves silly with tofurkey and drank wisconsin beer until we fell asleep on old corduroy couches that always smelled faintly of nagchampa and oranges and i forgot i was trying to patch up a relationship i had sabotaged. i remember so well waking up that next morning and eating leftover pie and taking a walk by the river and my roommate telling me, "let's write all about last night and put that paper somewhere safe so we'll never forget anything." there have been thanksgivings with our families for the first time and so much wine and laughing and remembering that as much as we fumble, as many mistakes as we make, as hard as we fall and as much as we bleed, there are times that we can say, as the last of the leaves fall and the trees become their old and crotchety selves, these are the people i love.