Remembrance of things past. (But no longer in search of lost time?)

The other day, I saw a boy I’d gone to middle school with. He asked me if I remembered him, and I didn’t feel like wasting time with playing the how-quickly-should-I-admit-I-know-exactly-who-you-are game, so I quickly assured him that I did. I joked that middle school had been the worst years of my life. “We didn’t talk much, did we?” he asked. We hadn’t, but we had had some classes together. And then he apologized. “I was such a jerk then,” he said.

And then I remembered how alone I felt in those seventh grade classrooms. And then I remembered the snickering comments I tried not to hear. And then I remembered the friend who abandoned me and the girls who would never be my friends in the first place. And so even though he had probably never said anything to me (though who knows what he could have said behind my back), his apology spread to encompass all the injuries of my entire middle school career. And the bland way in which I was able to shrug off his recollections, as something that didn’t matter anymore, made me realize that it really didn’t matter anymore. I was, I am, no longer my thirteen-year-old self.