People never stay the same.

I allowed myself to get a little lost in Facebook just a few moments ago and ended up looking through the “People You Might Know” list. I found a few people who I work with that I requested to add as friends on Facebook, nothing really remarkable, and then I started to just let the names and faces slide on by. I wasn’t trying to find anyone in particular.

Then I ran into a gaggle of names I dimly remember from my quite unpleasant teen years in high school. Most of those memories have been collected up and burned to ash, and in a way, I vowed that for most of it I would never again contact anyone from that period of my life. Apparently fate has other designs, but at least it has a very weak hand.

People get older, they change, they drift from the fixed memory you have of them. Whether they were monsters, assholes, annoying prats, or just names you dimly remember, there they are, like a rogues gallery in Facebook. All lined up, one after another. Youth seen through the lens of a very foggy memory and then all realized in their current form is unspeakably shocking and breathtaking. It’s a lot like watching a car crash in super slow motion. You know it’s going to be horrible and gory but you just can’t tear your attention away from the horror. Every single one of them followed a path that if I knew then as I know now, I would have spent way more of my teenage years laughing at these horrible human beings as I endured their constant abuse. Imagine a box, it’s filled with memories and it’s got tape covering the seams. The tape is printed with “Assholes and Monsters — Burn Immediately” so for a lot of these people, I just end up scrolling on by. Every once in a long while one of them will notice me and send me a friend request on Facebook. I stand a-stunned and almost always I click ignore. I have accepted a few, mostly people I dimly remember and names that seem familiar somehow, but I suspect that their photographs-in-memory are in that box. I just lack the motivation and interest to engage with them, so they continue to float on the periphery. Let sleeping dogs lie I suppose.

What does strike me, and what I wish my 35 year old self could send to my 17 year old self are these pictures, of these horrible nasty monstrous human beings. They all went bald, they all went fat, they all wear time like some sort of abrasion. Everyone goes this way, and the photographs in your memory, they remain. I’m not going to mention names lest it attract their attention, which I absolutely do not want, but it is worth remarking upon.

Another thing worth marveling at is how provincial they remain. They never got anywhere, never progressed. They’ve just waddled in tight little sad circles. They got as far as Cortland, Buffalo, and for some really unfortunates, Binghamton. They never explored, never set out and dispersed. I think above all else I am grateful that I escaped New York State. If I was still stuck in that place the regret would be unbearable.

It’s probably best for me, in a therapeutic sense to not return to the “People You Might Know” page on Facebook for quite some time. If that box full of Assholes and Monsters should pop open and I regain the memories that I buried oh so long ago, I would definitely be worse for the experience. The past really should remain in its shallow grave where it’s been whacked with a shovel and buried. I’m far happier not remembering.