163) Very Important Past

(Photo from popcrunch.)

As part of the move out process, I've been sorting through old notebooks that have piled up over the years. One of them, a heavy black sketchbook with thick pages that's served as my journal for the last decade, is especially entertaining to read through. My entries were much more frequent in those tumultuous, oh so tortured high school years. Nowadays it's a good year if I've written in it at least once.

The one thing that always kills me about my recording of the past is how serious everything seemed back then. Each incident with friends, each relationship or mild flirtation reads like a soap opera script. It's not so much the writing (I hope) - it's that I genuinely felt like everything was that important.

Here's my favorite example from high school, transcribed word for word. Names have been changed to protect the innocent:

Well, the inevitable happened. Charles broke up with Lisa today. She's taking it pretty hard. She's reacting physically. She says she's been crying for two days now and she can't seem to stomach any food. She said she threw up tonight. When she called she was crying so much - she was really crushed. Charles pulled a Matt and when she was telling me about it I became so sad because I remembered how it felt - the helplessness, the pain, etc. She sounded exactly like me when she called me crying. Role reversal. I wish I could be able to take all her pain away with one hug, but I know I can't. God, it just kills me to see her so sad. They went out for three months.

Kills me. But, I suppose it's human nature to believe that our lives are very, very important at any given stage.