old stuff

I’ve been sitting here for 30 minutes reading through old emails from college. I was searching for a particular one in which a boy that I pined after wrote to me while I was away for the weekend. The subject was something obscure and obtuse and the body of the email simply stated that he missed me and then he quoted Pink Floyd, “we are two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” For some reason I didn’t save that email. It is the only email I can fully recall from college. It stuck out. I remember coming back to school on Sunday night of that weekend and checking my email in some crowded computer lab and smiling because J. had thought of us as a “we.” He had sent an email with a “we” in it. It was my first. He was my first. And yet he wasn’t. I wanted to post just that email and let it stand alone as a testament to love of long ago, to a past I used to live, to naiveté and wonderment. Instead I’ve been rereading email after email where I talk about how much I missed people and how much stress I was under. And there are the few where I play counselor sending poems and messages of hope. Life is hard sometimes and yet I remember college as frilly and silly. Look around people, your reality is not really happening the way you see it. It all depends on how you will remember it. History gets garbled and tossed around in our brains and I hope at least that your history comes out as a happy one.