Unearthing the Past

My Dad recently cleaned out part of our basement that housed our treasured belongings (read: things I forgot I had). It was everything from my “old” room that I cleared out when I re-decorated and decided to become more grown-up (turns out, maturity is more of a choice). I was excited to go through everything – but what I didn’t plan on when being thrown back into the past was re-living memories that I’d long since forgotten.

Ironically, my high school best friend recently wrote about her childhood memories (guess we still have odd similarities from time to time!). This girl was my rock through high school. Without her, there would have been many more lonely days than the ones I already went through. We started as close friends in grade school, part of a core group of girls, and really became inseparable once high school rolled around (literally - her home was my second home, and I spent many, MANY days and nights there). One of our brilliant ideas, taken from Britney Spears’ critically acclaimed film Crossroads, was to create a time capsule of our future plans and current obsessions for us to open in 2005 (though I’m pretty sure we didn’t wait that long). I came across this time capsule again last night, and was treated to our young minds’ goals of our futures. She wanted to get married and become a recreationist with the elderly (both achieved). I wanted to move to England (did it) and become an ESL teacher (huh?). I also wanted to get married, but we all know my stance on that right now. Apparently we also thought it prudent to write the names of our “crushes” on a piece of paper and forever record in history the boys that our 15 year old selves liked. Mine wasn’t anything of consequence (although when he moved away, I fell apart listening "Right Here Waiting" or something. Young love...of which he was unaware). But hers would later go on to be a fairly large part of MY romantic life through my late teens and early 20s. Oh, how things change.

As a pre-teen/teen, I always tried to keep a diary. It lasted…3 days, usually. But I happened to find one of these diaries, which highlighted the main “issues” I had when I was 13, apparently. It’s not like I was writing about sleeping with a multitude of 13 year old boys or shooting heroin on the playground. No, I was writing to my diary about my distress about which boy I liked as more than a friend, or whether or not a certain boy was going to be at the Friday night Jube. If I were to write in a diary now, the man worries would be insignificant compared to money, job, and education worries. In University, my “diary” entries were jumbled sentences of me trying to make sense of the crazy thoughts inside my mind and trying to find some semblance of normalcy when I felt anything but. Sure, what I was writing about was petty, but it’s nice to be able to look back at my 13 year old self and know that I had all the worries that I should have had at that age, and none that I shouldn’t have had. Which is actually surprising to me, given that it was a year after quite arguably the worst year of my grade school experience. Where's JL? She might be able to explain this to me...

The diaries that I would try to keep would usually turn into a book for me to play MASH in and fill out fake questionnaires for my fake children. Apparently, I was very preoccupied with marriage and kids. SM and I joke that we got the domesticity out of our systems when we were kids playing make believe with fake families. There are literally pages and pages of MASH games filled with countries where I hoped to live and the names of boys from my school, boys from other schools, and boys from my brother’s hockey/baseball teams. When I wasn’t playing MASH, I was creating questionnaires about my children, documenting their names, birth dates, and whatever else I felt needed to be captured in these fake certificates. The last names changed periodically, usually to be the same as the boy of the hour. What I found most interesting, though, was the birthdate of these children. I remember picking a date that seemed sooo far into the future. 2012. Hm.

I found my grade 8 yearbook, which was full of pictures of old friends in their adolescent stages. Some of these friends I’ve grown apart from, and some I’m still in contact with, but not as close as I would like. Sometimes I wish I could go back to these friendships and “do” them differently and in a way that would solidify our friendship for years to come.

I can’t help but look at the present as I unearth my past, and compare who I was then to who I am now. I’m no longer horse crazy, nor do I make up fake information on my non-existent children. But I’m still the same little girl that values her friends and has dreams of traveling and moving to a different country. Only now, I won’t leave it up to MASH to determine where I’ll live or who I’ll marry. That’s too flighty, even for me.

Love,

Bella