I saw this thing on ITV the other week...

There are times in one's life when one gets hit upside the head with a sturgeon in the fish-slapping dance of day-to-day life.

Saturday was one of those for me. It was at a wedding of a friend when the sturgeon smacked me. The situation was an odd one. The bride was a woman I met about 6 years ago when I attended graduate school in MN. The groom was a member of the fraternity in which I was an honorary sister back in my undergrad days in NY. I had forgotten I had known him until I moved to IL and was introduced to him by his now wife, who had moved to IL just a short time before I did.

Anyway, at the wedding, there was a pew-full of members of my old fraternity. I expected to see two or three (two of the female members of the house who moved to WI since college were part of the wedding and I have had limited contact with them in the past ten years and the best man was from the same fraternity). But, when leaving the church with a friend from my days in MN, I saw familiar faces and hands waving to me and was hit by that sturgeon.

The past ten years suddenly folded and didn't exist. I wanted them to. Since, well, distance from events of my senior year of college did dull the pain of them somewhat. I couldn't keep the memories from coming back to hit me. Upon leaving the building, I went over to a moderate acquaintance from my MN days to talk, away from the people I once trusted as close friends. It wasn't for long. They came over to say hello in shifts, one brother I didn't know too well just hopping over and standing, staring down at me. I felt like it was a moment of "Hey! Look! It's Mike's ex! Let's poke her with a stick!" I tried to make the best of things, engaging in pleasant small-talk, latching onto the newest of my friends from IL who came over to chat. However, it didn't last too long.

At the reception, I tended to stick with my MN and IL friends, granted that I did know a few of them when I was an undergraduate. However, there are some people who you do find yourself keeping in contact with for the right reasons--not because you feel obligated to keep in contact with them, but you want to. These were those people. The fraternity people tended to cluster together. Every now and again, I would steel myself against the memories of them not telling me that my long-time boyfriend in the house was cheating on me with another sister in the house in the name of a f*cked up loyalty over ethics system, and would go over to try chatting with them about their lives now--not their lives then. However, they kept reverting to what they did in college, down to finding a table in the entry hall to play card games at...an activity that was constant in college. Stories from college kept coming up, or constant references. It was difficult to escape the pull of it. When I tried to explain why their playing cards got to me, I found myself telling a story from college, slipping into the same ant-trap.

There was an open bar, but I drove and couldn't disconnect the brain-cells that were causing the main issues. So, I tried to disconnect them later with two of the people (among others) I have kept in contact with since college later in the evening and ended up feeling horribly stressed-out by it all and the feeling of not being adequate or interesting enough...feeling like the heart-broken and betrayed recent college graduate I was ten years ago.

Yeah. There are real reasons why I haven't kept in touch with so many of those people. And, as I realized, the reasons are still very present and valid.

The only real amusing thing though was a comment from one of the guys that he was so completely shocked that I looked just like I did ten years ago and that I hadn't changed a bit. He was full of shit, so it was amusing...

...and true to form and what I expect of them.