I’m about to sit down for a coffee with an old school friend, well I say that, but we weren’t actually friends at school, he was way too popular to talk to the likes of me. He was tall and sporty, and everyone knows the sporty ones are always popular. I was not – not sporty and not popular. I would do anything to get out of PE, probably because we had to have showers after and I was small in all aspects of physical appearance and the butt of all jokes, but that’s another story. I also had no natural affiliation with taking my normal clothes off and running around with a ball, which is what most school PE lessons entailed.
We didn’t become friends until 1998 when I organised a school reunion, a reunion where nobody recognised me. My friend tells me I have probably changed the most of anyone who went to the reunion, but he assures me, it’s not in a bad way. It’s kind of weird organising something where nobody recognised you. The whole night I had people coming up to me and saying, “Who are you?”, which gets a bit infuriating after the twentieth time of explaining.
Thinking about it now, I should have used it to my advantage and made up some name that would really have kept them guessing, but at the time it was my way of saying well you ignored me then, but you will remember me now. I’m not sure I achieved that though, however hard I tried. If you asked most of the attendants now ‘who organised the reunion?’, I’m sure few would remember or want to remember, even though everyone said it was a brilliant night and so were the three other reunions that followed. We have discussed doing more but neither I, or my friend have any inclination in regurgitating the past, even though it is the twenty years since the last reunion and forty years since leaving the school.
For all his popularity, my friend remains single, having never found the one, whilst I have been happily married for 25 years next year. Which goes to prove popularity doesn’t always ensure finding your soul mate.
As for me, I think I have always been a forgettable person and probably always will be but I’ve learnt to live with it as it does have its advantages.
Photo by Steven Abraham on Unsplash
Tina’s writing 