25th Reunion

There were the people who hadn't changed at all. At least, not much. If I'd seen them anywhere else, I would've immediately recognized them, even without the nametags we all wore. They have good genes, I guess, immune to the passage of 25 years. Then there were the people who had changed a lot. The cute boy who had morphed into a nerdy professor complete with glasses, paunch and beard. The wallflower who had become a knockout. I'd heard once that by your 25th reunion all the cliques would be gone, the old hierarchies abandoned. Whoever told me that lied. They were all still in place, each of us gravitating to what we once knew, falling into the familiar.

These girls are my familiar.

We hung out at one table, danced to our old favorite songs, and never got too far away from each other's orbit the entire night. We were there for the reunion, but mostly we were there for each other. Because we can't miss a chance to reunite, a chance to all be together. We know each other in the now, but we also knew each other then. When I look at these faces, I see 25 years of history, the scope of us. I see the high school girls with their whole lives ahead of them and the 40something women juggling careers and heartbreaks and teenagers.

I see something precious and rare. Something to celebrate. And so on Saturday night we celebrated. And then we went back to our real lives, lives that are mostly apart from each other. Lives that are vastly different. But lives that are tied by the thread of history and experience, a silken thread that is stronger than you might think. Sometimes you gotta take that thread and tie it into a bow. I think that's what 25th reunions are for.