June 5, 2004

The worst despair I had ever felt in my life came over me on the day Ronald Reagan.  It wasn't because Ronald Reagan had died, though I suppose that didn't help.

That day was a Saturday, and fell between the last day I was expected to show up at my high school and the day of the graduation ceremony itself.  A lot of what I was feeling was the usual graduation angst, exacerbated by the rituals of the process, which I could see were pointless and overblown but wasn't capable of resisting.  The other thing was that I was in the fifth month of an embarrassing, stupid crush on one of my classmates.  I could see that was pointless and overblown too, but was even less capable of resisting it.  There's nothing quite so frustrating as being aware on an intellectual level to the solution of your problems and being emotionally able to apply it.  I knew that I wasn't really in love with him, just confused and unable to process my feelings of friendship.  I knew that even if I had really been in love with him, we would have made a terrible couple.  And I knew that even if I had been in love with him and we would have made a decent couple, he wasn't gay.  And even so, I couldn't stop imagining romantic (but not sexual; that just made me feel guilty) scenarios.

All this had been building for months, and the imminence of graduation, with the knowledge that afterward I would no longer have to see him every day, was both wonderful and horrible.  The Friday of that week was Class Day, when seniors marched into the school's ratty, uncomfortable theater and received whatever scholarships and awards had been deemed insignificant enough not to be worth a place among the dozens given out at graduation itself.  Probably I got something-- I was a terribly good boy, the salutatorian in fact, or as I thought of it then, "almost good enough"-- but I have no memory of that.  What I do remember is being invited to a party at a classmate's house that afternoon.  My first impulse, in that moment as always, was to say "No."  I liked my classmates quite a lot, but the school day was enough of a social life for me.  After school I wanted to go home, do my homework, and read a book or watch TV.

But I was feeling that graduation nostalgia, and people did seem to want me there, so I said yes.  I didn't drive then (and don't now), so my aunt drove me over to the friend's house, which was a very nice place overlooking a lake.  I don't remember much about the party itself.  There was a grill, and although I don't eat much at parties I probably had something.  There were games, I think, but I've never been much on that either.  Most likely I just walked around, talking to people in the mock-sarcastic manner I put on to amuse them without revealing my actual personality (if I even had one).  I know I talked at least once to the guy I had the crush on, and congratulated myself for dealing with him as though nothing had changed, although for all I know how I felt was written all over my face.

It got late, late enough that the summer sun had disappeared.  I was planning to go home, but it turned out that a bunch of people were going to sleep over in a tent on the back lawn.  I let myself be talked into staying as well.  That may not sound like much, but as far as I can tell, it's the first time I had ever spent the night at the house of someone who was my friend, rather than a friend of my parents or other relatives.  It's not that I resisted invitations; I just wasn't the sort of person anyone would think to invite over.  I was, I guess, an amusing background feature, the equivalent of a teacher you like during the school day and can't imagine has a real life after the building closes.  But maybe I'm selling my friends short, and they never asked me anywhere because they could sense I would have gotten nervous and refused, or agreed only to back out a few hours later.

Anyway, I stayed in the tent.  The next morning I think I refused breakfast from my friend's parents, and another friend agreed to give me a ride home.  In his car on the way back he had a mix tape playing, or maybe it was the radio.  One of the songs was Billy Joel's "Goodnight Saigon."  I wasn't feeling all that badly yet, but I was in enough of a state to identify with the song to a ridiculous degree.  (My self-pity gene has never known a sense of proportion.)  Even today it's one of my favorite songs, though now the feeling has more to do with the skill and talent on on display than with my adolescent fatalism.

At home there was nothing for me to do.  I had already written the speech I would read at graduation the following day, which I was very proud of and now see as a mass of cliches, with its basic conceit stolen from (of all things) Babylon 5.  (On the other hand, it's one of the few graduation speeches in history to contain the phrase "semen stains.")  So I lay in bed with the blinds shut and thought about how miserable I was.  In the past when I'd felt down I had always asked myself, "But you're still not suicidal, right?"  The answer had always been "Oh, God, no," which made me feel slightly better.  But this time I tried it and got back the answer "Eh, I guess not."  This was enough to terrify me.

Eventually I got out of bed and wandered out to the living room, where someone was watching the news coverage of Reagan's death.  I don't think I felt much of anything about that.  I was a solidly liberal Democrat in those days, so I thought very little of Reagan as a politician, but I had that whole "respect for the office" thing going on, and I always get a tiny twinge when anyone dies, even someone awful like a serial killer.  I was, at least, sane enough not to turn his death into part of my own melancholy.

And then... what?  I got through the day, I guess.  If there was a turning point, which I doubt, I don't remember it.  The next day I kept my stage fright under control, managing to deliver my speech to decent response.  After the ceremony came Project Graduation, where I wandered the rooms of the civic center, bored with everything that was happening but somehow disinclined to leave.  A couple times I was ambushed by a fellow senior I had never met before who wanted to have long talks with me about life.  She was a very nice girl, but we had nothing in common and I didn't know what to say to her.  (During winter break in my sophomore year of college I ran into her at a local gas station, and she demanded my mailing address at school.  I gave it, and the following semester got a letter from her that lay on my desk for months, quietly demanding a reply I never wrote.  I found the same letter while going through my papers earlier this month, and felt guilty all over again.)  Once in a while I would run into the boy I had a crush on, and feel this sensation like pressure in my head, as though there was something I ought to do, even though I knew damn well there wasn't.

Project Graduation ended at 4:00 AM, and someone gave me a ride home.  After that, well, life happened.  I went to college, and slowly got over my silly crush, to the point where I now think of it rather fondly, as a symbol of who I was back then.  In some ways it embarrasses me that I was vulnerable to something so obvious as a schoolboy crush, but I tell myself that I was 18, and no one gets a free pass from that.  Writing this reflection brought back the pain and frustration, but also relief at the realization that I can put it all back in the past if I need to.  One of the subtexts of my speech was that high school is hell, and indeed it is.  But, despite the dreams I have sometimes, high school is over and done.  And that's a good thing.