Beautiful Mess

So a lot of my friends on Facebook have been posting old photographs lately, from high school and even some from junior high.  I don’t mind, I like looking at them.  Those years were a really great time in my life (although I had plenty of teenage angst, of course), and I get nostalgic looking at that stuff. 

However.

One of my “friends” posted several pictures from junior high.  It is a boy I knew in grade school/junior high, but I was never really great friends with him and I don’t remember speaking with him much once we were in high school.  But he’s on Facebook, and I like to see what people are doing and I enjoy leaving nice comments on Facebook, so I accepted his friends request.  Then I started getting email after email that he had tagged me in some photos.  Obviously I knew they had to be old since I haven’t seen him in so many years, and I went to check them out.  

He had posted picture after picture of me.  First a picture of me and my little junior high boyfriend (gnarly sloppy kisser, by the way).  Then he posted a picture of he and I at a school dance (not sure how that happened because we surely never dated).  He added a few more, and I was relieved to see that some of the others included other people, not just me.  But I was in all but one of them.  I started to feel a little weird about it, because like I said, we were never that good of friends.  But obviously it is harmless.

So then another girl commented on the photograph of me and him, wondering if I was his second date for this same dance, as he had posted a picture of himself and another girl at the same dance), and he said, “oh no, [Jem] is second to no one in my opinion.”

Folks, I am a sucker for ANY kind of flattery.  It made me feel good.  More than it should have, I think.

It’s just that when I look back at all of those photos from when I was younger, I can remember the confidence I had then.  I was always self-conscious, mind you, but I don’ t know, I just had a confidence then that I don’t have now.  I was cuter.  Thinner.  I felt a lot shinier then than I do now.  Does that makes sense? 

I sent one of the pictures from when I was 18 to a friend of mine who didn’t know me back then.  It took her a while to figure out which one of those girls was me.  Yikes.  She said, but [Jem], you still look the same.  You have gained weight, yes, but you could be that girl again.

Um, no.  I will never be that girl again.  She was 18.  I am 31.  She had naturally blond hair, thighs that didn’t touch, and no student loans.   Virtually no responsibilities whatsoever.  She used to walk down the football player’s hallway (which had a nasty smell, btw) in her tennis skirt and pretend she didn’ t know they were looking at her.    She could go buy a prom dress without worry about her arm flab and ginormous boobs. 

I can’t get back the youthful naivete and blissful ignorance that she had then.  Nor can I get back the flawless skin.  I try to tell myself that the thing I have now add up to more than what she had.  Those old pictures?  That’s what I looked like when I was proud of myself, and I don’t know how to explain it except to say that I don’t look like that anymore. 

I’m concerned I’m one of those cliche girls who peaked in high school.  I need to pick myself up and make some changes.  And I don’t mean to make it sound like there is so much wrong with my life or who I am not; there’s not.  I just want to polish it up and make it shine a little, you know?