January 20, 2020: Cool Kids

Song: “Cool Kids” by Echosmith from Talking Dreams

The school loomed over them. It was both smaller and larger. Physically smaller than they recalled, but somehow weightier, more foreboding. Going to school didn’t used to be fun but there was a routine to it. The school was a place where things happened, mostly stuff they didn’t like. Now though…now it was an object filled with memory and the reality that time had sprinted along, carrying them away with it, away from this place.

“Look at Mr. Popular!” someone shouted. He grimaced. That wasn’t who he was, not outside high school. No, he was an underemployed office worker who rented a condo because he was lousy at saving and convinced that there was no reason to set down roots because certainly things would get better soon.

“All hail Cheer Captain Smith!” an old friend gasped when they saw her. She blushed hard and wished she was anywhere else. Twenty years later she didn’t really recognize herself as the former cheer captain. She didn’t look it, she didn’t feel it. The reminder didn’t feel like retouching glory. It felt like a reminder of how far afield life had drifted.

They made eye contact. He hesitantly smiled. Her heart broke a little for him. She could see her pain mirrored in his weariness. The inability to stop being who their classmates remembered them. Their classmates had a better grasp of that version of them than they did. For their classmates, it was a blink. For them it was an ocean of time away. Injuries and divorces and depressive spells and years of sobriety and relapses separated them from the people they were.

The DJ put on their prom song. He could have jumped that table and pummeled that guy, the kid really, for this. It wasn’t cute. It made him feel enraged and utterly empty in equal measure.

She heard the whispers start. Oh god…her classmates were going to demand it, again. For them to dance. Prom king and queen.

Sure they broke up Thanksgiving break the fall after graduation. Yes, he cried for weeks. Yes, she had been counting the days down before she could do it so she could hook up with the guy down the hall without concern. And yes, she had tried to get him back 2 years and four months after that. And yes he turned her down to hurt her even as it hurt him more.

But that was all secret history and forgotten rumors. To their classmates, they remained the King and Queen, the cutest couple.

The thing they really hated was not performing it for their classmates, that miming of love that faded but would magically return for one dance. That was just annoying.

What they hated was how it tricked them. Their minds. Their hearts. Because for their classmates, it was like watching an old tv show they loved. But for him and her? It felt like it was real again, like time and they themselves had not ruined it. They felt in love again. They felt like the cutest couple, like the King and Queen. And then gravity returned. And they were themselves again. Separate. In their forties. No one’s idea of cutest couple. No crowns.

It made life that much harder, to taste what you lost once more.