We are young

I have searched for and found an old . . . acquaintance? peer? classmate? eventual muse? I had known in high school, fifty-two years ago. I was a senior in Yearbook class, she was a junior who for some reason sat next to me once or fifty times – I have no remem­brance. No one could have been more the neurotic, dissociated infant-in-teen’s clothing than I, while she was one of the on-the-ball intelligentsia. I wrote puerile-clever cap­tions (“titillate”). I never knew what her specialty was on the yearbook, but there’s no doubt that she belonged there and I didn’t.

I was (to be charitable to myself) a lost child sitting next to her who would be, had I been passably human, my feminine idol, but I felt nothing then. At least nothing that I could let ascend from gut and heart to brain. It wasn’t until I went off to college – my Rapunzel’s ivory tower – the very moment I arrived that it occurred to me she was my savior, the container of my life. We wrote serious letters (though hers may have been perfunctory) in which I hid my true mean­ing within purple-prose philoso­phizing. Thank goodness I was too cowardly to poison her with my foolishness.

We’ve been writing now, and of course it’s been strange. What does one call a wistful exhil­ara­tion that is composed mostly of unreal feelings and ancient, residual hope that evaporates the instant one looks at it? I reify nostalgia: I picture her in my head, not 69 but 17, and the present is serenely, forever, the past. I am lost in this ghostly connection.

In just a few emails we’ve acknowledged that we both are not very good at love. We referred to relationship troubles and distance. But actually, I believe we are both extreme­ly good at love. I suspect we were both born with the indestructible kernel of it, which never leaves. Life obstructs it. Maybe this theory makes sense: The further back we look, age sixty, thirty, seventeen, ten, five, the closer we get to that golden kernel, that Eden, our truest happiest self. From that perspective, nostal­gia is rebirth.