The Reunion

Everything about me at my school Debs back in 1990 screamed self-conscious, awkward and out of place.  I’m still a little uncomfortable looking at the pictures.  My body language in most of them says it all really.  My arms were folded self-consciously across my chest.  I just wasn’t comfortable with the whole dressing up aspect of it, the hair, the make-up and the bloody shoes.  

I hadn’t seen my classmates for the guts of three months and everyone, it seemed to me anyway, had morphed overnight into these supremely confident, gorgeous people and I was still the awkward, stay at home schoolgirl I had always been.

I was taking a year out and completing a secretarial course because I wasn’t organised enough to decide what I wanted to do with my future.  I wasn’t studying in Dublin and enjoying the nightlife while I was at it.

The future you see had crept up on me overnight.  I honestly believed 6^th year was going to last forever.

At my Debs, the table across from the one I was sitting at had one of those champagne buckets with a bottle of bubbly cooling in it and my ex classmates were drinking it like it was something they did all the time.  I was clutching a glass of fizzy something or other.  On the rocks. 

I was shocked and completely thrown to see someone I had “hung around” with in school lighting a cigarette and puffing away on it.    This was crazy shit!  I felt so out of place, hopelessly unsophisticated and naïve.  I still lived at home, had yet to meet the love of my life and decide what I wanted to do with him.  I needed to get some kind of job.  I’d never even been drunk for crying out loud!

I just wanted to go home and forget all about the Debs.  It was proving too much for me. 

Well, fast forward twenty-two years.

I am returning to the scene of the crime and I cannot wait!!

Twenty two years would make their mark on anyone.  We’ve all done something with ourselves and it doesn’t matter what went before or came after, we’ve all made our own journey. 

I can’t wait to meet up with my classmates, again, some of whom I haven’t seen in those two decades.  Will I recognise them?  Will they recognise me?

I see the odd person up and down; at the school gates, in the supermarket or on Facebook.   

It’s mad how life happened and we lost touch with each other. 

But life has come full circle and meet ups in a school environment are regular again.  Except this time we are dropping off or collecting our own kids. 

I’ve got the frock, the eyebrows are done and my dancing shoes are all lined up, waiting to go.