Just Kids.

This past weekend, I received a group text message started by one of my friends from high school, telling us that a former classmate had died in a motorcycle accident.  When she told us, I had to search my brain a bit to place a face with his name - I did graduate with over 500 other high school seniors eighteen years ago - but after thinking about him a bit and texting back and forth with my friends recalling some various details about our class and his circle of friends, it came back to me exactly who he was. Nate.  A football player.  Nice enough, but a bit of a "tough guy" who ran with the football/cheerleader clique.  Obviously, given that it took me a few minutes to remember him, he and I were not close and we clearly ran in different circles in high school.  Still, learning of a death is never pleasant, particularly when it is someone your own age, too young to go, too soon.  It is a shock, a jolting reminder that we are all mortal.  That nothing is guaranteed.

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I have a copy of my old yearbook here in my apartment.  As you might imagine, I don't look at it all that often these days, though I'm forever grateful that I have it on hand, for each time I do open the pages I feel as if I've somehow managed, ever so briefly, to step back in time.  Suddenly I am seventeen again with my innocent crushes and dear, silly friends who I, at seventeen, think are the only dear and silly friends I will ever know and love. I've got thoughts on prom and Spirit Week and our senior class trip.  I have favorite teachers and not so favorite teachers.  I can't really imagine being anywhere else, of all the many possible paths that lay before me, before all of us. For my world in 1997, while wonderful and educated and ripe with opportunities is still so small, so safe, so closely knit to the only home I have known, to the twenty or so square miles my high school friends and I all live in during one very brief - but oh, those high school years can feel so long! - blink in our lives.

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On Tuesday night I sat on my living room rug, slowly thumbing through each page of our senior class, pausing occasionally, remembering.  We were all so proud of ourselves, so happy. Confident.  We trusted fate and the stars aligning and all that we believed the future held for us.  Looking through that old yearbook reminds me of laughing in between classes with my friends, of meeting at our lockers at the end of the day to walk to the senior class parking lot together, of sharing our stress and concerns about SATs and college applications and prom dates.  Pouring over my yearbook's pages, I lingered the longest on the photos of those classmates who are no longer with us.  A car accident took this one, a rumored drug overdose for another one, suicide for one, another car accident.  Too many accidents.  I suppose the odds were always shifted this way, that in a class of over 500 students, we were bound to not get to our 20 year - even our 10 year - reunions with all of us still together, intact as a class, alive.

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I can't really mourn for the recent passing of my classmate, as he and I never really knew each other beyond the occasional nod or hello in the hallway or in the random gym class or lunch period we might have had together.  I didn't genuinely know who he was at seventeen and I never learned the man he grew into in his thirties.  Still, I can mourn the loss of a fellow Renegade.  Another spirit gone from this world, a soul who shared a hometown and a high school with me, another empty seat at our fast approaching twenty year reunion.

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They say that youth is wasted on the young.  Looking back at those innocent, smiling, bright-eyed faces posing for their senior portraits, part of my 35 year old self is inclined to agree.  There was so much about the world we did not yet know!  As these things go of course, we - The Class of 1997! - thought we had everything figured out.  On top of our game. We didn't know how much we didn't know. 

So sure, maybe some of that youth was wasted on our sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old selves.  But I don't really think so.  After all, there is supposed to be a time in your life when you have all the time in the world, with nothing but a blank and beautiful white canvas in front of you, ready for your mark.  That's what makes our youth so powerful isn't it?

After all, we were just kids.