Last Saturday night was my 20-year high school reunion. They’re not cool anymore so I didn’t attend. The end.

Just kidding, of course I went. Why wouldn’t I? I had a lot of friends that I cared deeply for when I was a youth. Even if I haven’t seen them in twenty years, the caring never stopped. We may have grown apart, or failed to keep in touch, but I still consider them my friends. I’m still invested in knowing about their triumphs and tribulations. At this age, I treasure every opportunity I have to see any friend, let alone a lot of them all at once. I wanted to find out how my former classmates have been, and to let them know hey, I’ve missed you, I still think about you, I hope you’re doing well.

Also, I was hoping everyone would be real fat.

Sadly, they weren’t.

Well, somebody was. Twas I. I’m the fat one.

I don’t know what forbidden sorceries my graduating class has had access to over the past twenty years, but everybody looked exactly the same. Like flies caught in amber, they have remained untouched by the (what I thought was) inevitable march of time. They all just seem to have cumulatively decided to…not age?

Mistress Kay and I must not have gotten that memo. We have aged POORLY. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still me. We’re still us. We’re just far worse in every way. Sure, my total volume of hair has probably remained constant, but it has mostly changed from brown to grey and traveled from my head to my back. And sure, Mistress Kay might still be an ethereal beauty, a total babage, a true Venus, but the Venus she resembles these days evokes more Willendorf than Milo. Even so, even with my balding head and brittle bones, and Mistress Kay’s paleolithic fertility goddess shaped body, we’re still laughing at the same jokes, enjoying the same activities, and succumbing to the same hedonistic urges we always have. And those urges still include partying with our pals.

So, heck yes, we went to the reunion. And naturally, we brought our Molds with us.

Look, after nearly twenty years of loving (barely tolerating) my dumb ass, Mistress and Molds have already met many of my friends, but the majority of those friends are people I became close to as an adult, in college or after, NOT friends from my childhood. I looked forward to introducing the ladies in my life to the various dumb idiots who knew me in my most formative years and helped shape me into who I’ve ultimately become (a dumb idiot). I thought it might help explain some things for them (such as my idiocy). Plus, I got to show up to the event with two babes and pretend I was cool for once.

Also, I liked my childhood, I thought high school was fun, and I remember it fondly.

Sadly, it appears that not everybody else felt the same way. Turnout for the reunion was okay, good even, but it was certainly not a majority of my graduating class, and a surprising (to me) amount of my former classmates attended without their spouses, or didn’t attend at all.

And I took that personally.

Look, logically I know that not a single person who received an invitation to the reunion thought, oh, I wonder if Max will be there, and then made their choice on whether or not to go based on my RSVP. I’m barely the main character in my own story, so I doubt I’ve earned even a passing mention in the appendix of anybody else’s. So yes, I know, of course I know, that nobody was making any social decisions based on my absence or presence. And yet, I can’t quite ignore that vicious little voice whispering in my head that the people who didn’t attend chose not to come because they hate me personally and didn’t want to see me, and wish I was dead. Which is sad, because I sure wanted to see them. I wanted to see everybody.

I’m ever so lonely.

Even taking the people who never RSVPed, or declined, or simply couldn’t be tracked down to receive an invite into account, at the end of the day, attendance was still pretty good, and seeing the people I got to see was a real treat. And I suppose I can forgive the people that couldn’t or wouldn’t attend. Twenty years after graduation is a tough time for a reunion after all. We’re all approaching 40, most of us are now married or seeing someone. A majority have bought or are renting our own homes, and those homes are mostly located far away from our small, expensive, redneck bourgeois hometown. We’re also in our prime money-making years and are all very busy with our jobs. For those of us that have children, most of our children are still actual children, not yet independent teens or adults. So, I get that taking time off work, finding childcare, and traveling back to our boring hometown to spend too much money eating and drinking and making painful small talk with people we haven’t seen in half a lifetime might be a tough sell.

For me, all of those barriers were actually incentives. Yes, I’m married, but like I said, I wanted my current world and my former world to mix and mingle. Yes, work sucks and I’m busy as hell, but that just means I could really use a break to drink heavily with other adults. Yes, we have a toddler who still requires constant supervision, and yes, we live moderately far away and had to travel back to my old stomping grounds, but wouldn’t you know it, two birds one stone, my mother still lives in my childhood home, and she was more than happy to get some quality grandma/granddaughter slumber party time in while the girls and I were out drinking and dancing like our knees don’t hurt with people I haven’t seen since my knees didn’t hurt.

Really, my only worry was, what if I wasn’t able to really relate to any of my former peers? What if after twenty years apart, we have all grown too distant, and we couldn’t find common ground to reconnect? Thankfully, my fears proved to be 100 percent unfounded. Reconnecting with everybody after such a long time was a complete joy. We may have an additional twenty years of growth and development and unique individual experiences, but we’re all still ourselves. The people we have become are all built on foundations created back then. The thoughts in my head are hopefully at least slightly more mature and complex than they were when I was a child, but the brain they’re running on is the same hunk of salty meat and electricity it always has been. The me I am today may not be completely familiar to the me from twenty years ago, but that teenaged me is still in there, and he absolutely recognized the teenaged versions of my high school friends, even if they too have been wrapped up in sophisticated adult packaging in the intervening years. I am happy to report that just as I was in awe of my friends twenty years ago, I am even more in awe of them now. They done grown up good.

Be that as it may, I still wish more people had come than just the gorgeous ageless vampires who showed up. I wanted to see the freaks and weirdos. The misfits. The philosopher kings. The poets. The mad artists. The queer, the fae, the fantastical. You know, Interesting folk. Instead, I got to see the hot kids who grew up into hot adults standing around being hot. Which, to be fair, was still pretty nice.

To those of my former classmates who went to the reunion, you look incredible, it was wonderful to see you, I’m so glad we got to catch up. To those who did not go, I wish you did. I miss you. Give me a call sometime.

Ultimately, it was a fun night. 10/10, would do it again in another twenty years.