What We Are Not Now

That is exactly what reunions remind us of, and that is precisely why I dislike them. I don’t mean the high school kind- at which I would not be caught dead; why recreate torture ten years after the fact?- but the kind that just happen, the ones which don’t come with decades of emotional baggage and aren’t planned a thousand years in advance. I bring this up because on Thursday last year’s crop of MAs had their graduation ceremony, which naturally occasioned some degree of reunion.
It was a very strange thing, really, not because I didn’t do the ceremony and all (I never do- what’s the pint? Graduation is something you do for your family to watch, and there was never any chance of any of my families making it over here) but because it was seeing everyone out of context. I hate graduations on principle. They put me through an emotional wringer. It’s an ending, it’s a beginning, it’s symbolic of change, and I don’t do change gracefully. Just the first few bars of ‘Pomp & Circumstance’ is enough to turn me weepy, because it symoblises that schism.
A lot of people from here in England and Europe came back for it. With the exception of Marie, whom I didn’t see, the Stateside crowd couldn’t make it. So while it was great to see people- I went out to lunch with Lucrezia and out for drinks with Jessica and Robin- their presence served more than anything to highlight the absences. I saw some of the archaeology crowd who still live here in York- Christina, Ashley- whom I never see, even if we’re in the same town. Being with this group of people, I kept halfway looking over my shoulder to see everyone else. Without everyone being present, last year’s dynamic was also in absentia. Would it have made a difference, if, for example, Jon and Kenny, inarguably my closest friends last year and still dear to my heart, had been there? In a way, perhaps it is a good thing my dearest friends were not here: I would not like to think of how upsetting it would be to discover that even that dynamic was different.
In truth, I suspect that would be the case, because in addition to missing people, I am forced to realise how different I am this year. By virtue of living through last year, I can’t ever be who I was last year. My life is in such a different place that naturally I see and respond to things differently. My friendship circle here in York is not really made up of the group from last year- I was not then close to any of the people among the Tribe, and the Tribe and the old days don’t quite fit together comfortably.
Last year was special because each of us fit into it in a specific way and played a certain role. Take any of it away, and it can’t be the same, obviously, but add anything and it also gets peculiar. My friendships with people as individuals hasn’t altered that radically, but in larger groups the gaps become more visible. And that, to me, is the really bittersweet thing about graduations: we will never all be in that place again. All of us will never again be in one room, most likely, and even if we were, the people we would be sending who carried our names and faces would not be the people who were there before. Everything changes, and life goes on. It is not an especially tragic thing- it’s just life. But it’s still enough to make me feel a little wistful... even if I didn’t have to listen to ‘Pomp & Circumstance’.