It's all over but the crying
An invitation to my 10-year high school reunion has arrived in the mailbox. I pick it up, contemplating the small print. Please join your graduating class for an evening of dinner and dancing, it says. I try and think of a situation which would deliver more trauma, something conceptually more grim than this scenario, and have trouble coming up with anything. Even death itself can be less methodical and slow: a car crash can occur instantaneously, truncating your life abruptly and swiftly, but an evening of dinner and dancing could last for hours. I show Adam the invitation, who is also a member of my graduating class. “I’m not going,” I tell him. He chides and goads me on before I tell him more definitively, “No, it’s final.”

Life has turned out less than optimal. These gatherings only seem to provide a forum for putting on display lives that have turned out optimally, and then giving those people others to situate their own optimal-ness on. And I’d just rather not be a part of the situating process. My own life seems evocative of Kilgore Trout, and gargantuan portions of failure, which is not something I want to be showing around. Although it does occur that Trout touts his failing. And so maybe that’s something.

We are sitting in front of the house when Adam brings this up again. Drunk on a Wednesday night. We laugh at this fact. It is 2:30 am, and it feels pretty low. Shouldn’t we be somewhere else right now, doing something more adult? But it’s true that we need some kind of diversion from our jobs, which just happens to come in the form of a mid-week bender. “I’m going to go to the reunion,” he tells me, before offering up his carefully conscripted rationale. “I know it will be the worst day of my life. And that everyday thereafter—whether I’m at my job or in some other sordid scenario—it won’t be that bad, because I will have already experienced my life’s worst moments.” I soak this in a minute, taking in the optimism inherent in the gesture. It does sound pretty genius, I have to admit, so cripplingly low of an idea that it might just be true. And so it’s settled: we’re going, because things couldn’t be worse.