Last Saturday my middle school had a 20th Reunion celebration. As I got ready I couldn’t help but be filled with the same fear that I had before my first middle school dance. To mitigate the feeling of awkwardness for not drinking alcohol I brought the famed Bethenny Frankel Mingle Mocktails for the group. But upon entering the auditorium I was greeted with bear hugs that were backed by genuine love. In so many ways, I felt like I was home.
As we lined up for a photo, the songs we had sung at class night on that same stage came flooding back to me, the lyrics of one in particular were super emergent.
“I’m 15 for a moment
Caught in between ten and 20
And I’m just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are…
15, there’s still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose
15, there’s never a wish better than this
When you’ve only got a hundred years to live.”
Fifteen years old is a world without the pressure, and in a lot of ways a world without pain. For most of us, life hadn’t showed us how it could go wrong, really wrong yet.
I want to take this opportunity to offer a moment of solace for our classmates Jesse, Angelo, and Marty, who are no longer with us.
For a lot of us that was the first time we experienced loss. We weren’t fifteen anymore.
As the night succumbed I took an Irish exit, but got caught in the web of blokes smoking outside, a true blessing. They weren’t going to let me leave in anything but laughter, and I was so grateful for them. As I eventually pardoned myself and turned toward the “new” parking lot paved by administrations that came after us, I watched my shadow become the darkness I walked toward. Let the light behind me last a hundred years.