who among us has the wisdom to know
when a story has truly ended
and when it has simply paused
My family drops me off in Champaign at the cute little house where Julia lives with her boyfriend Neil. The whole way there, I am a nervous wreck. Every time we see a sign for how many miles are left, I shout it out to everyone in the car. My family is ready to have me committed. Every new years, my best high school friends and I get together. Every time we’re together, it’s just like old times. Every time we’re together, it’s like coming back to the realest, truest version of myself. And every time we’re together, we all freak out beforehand. It’s a vicious cycle.
Julie comes out to greet me, and there is much screaming and jumping up and down. My father makes an unnecessary comment about how skinny she is. (He doesn’t always understand what comments are acceptable to make and what comments are not. Especially concerning people’s weight. I love him anyway.) Then, he makes a remark about how he hopes that the fact that Julia goes to church will rub off on me. Julia and I look at each other, sigh, and go inside.
We watch a video of Julia singing “Una Voce Poco Fa” in high school, accompanied by a tiny little mini-orchestra which includes me, Ryan, and Casie. We all laugh at all the same spots that we laughed at the time. We make fun of our hair. We talk about how much we miss people, like Sukha and Mr. Running and Ross and Megan. We feel very old.
After awhile, we drive to Springfield, where we are going to visit Ryan and his family for the evening. The trek across the state is one that we’ve both made many, many times - but not together, and not for a long time. On the way, it occurs to me that I haven’t seen Ryan in almost three years, and I haven’t seen his family in exactly three years. This just makes me more nervous. When we turn onto his culdesac, we freak out. I feel like I’ve just been punched in the stomach. We hold hands as we ring the doorbell.
Sean, his younger brother, opens the door. The last 3 years have turned Sean into a grownup. He’s older now than Ryan and Julia and Casie and I were the last time we were all in Springfield together, and that’s weird enough. Then, Ryan comes to the door, and he is just exactly the same. I hug him, and he notices that Julia and I are both wearing huge boots (which makes us both over six feet tall.) We take them off.
We hang out at the house for awhile, listening to music and telling old stories. Eventually, we go to Chili’s, where I order a “Bloomin’ Onion” and then feel like an idiot when I realize that we are not at Outback. I ignore the glare I am getting from the waiter, and change my order to an “Awesome Blossom”, which they actually serve.
We start drinking margaritas and talking, and conversation rolls around to January of 1997. Let me backtrack - in December of 1995, we were all cast in a high school production of No Exit. This is how we met, and was the first of several theatrical endeavors we undertook together. The three of us spent all 2nd semester of our senior year together, and that was where this strange twisted relationship began. In January of 1996 we started rehearsing it. In January of 1997, we did it again. I was taking Interim off, because I hated college and didn’t think I was going to go back. We came to Augustana, where Julia was going to school at the time, and we revamped it. We got rid of all the showy, self-indulgent decisions the original director had made, and we really made it our own. It was far more realistic, and significantly darker than the first version. This was compounded by the fact that the bizarre love triangle had pretty much gotten too tangled to fix, and there was a metric assload of resentment floating in the air. Any time NEII comes up, we get tense, we talk in circles, we don’t ever tell each other the full truth.
I have had just about enough. I have had a bit of margarita, and I am remembering the resolution I made last year. (We all do our resolutions together every new years … it’s a thing. You know.) I made this resolution not to be an innocent bystander in my own life anymore. To take things into my own hands instead of just watching. And frankly, I am sick of this secretive, self-righteous bullshit. I start telling my side of the story the way it really happened - and once I get started, I find that I am unable to stop. Julia’s jaw drops, and Ryan starts to smile in spite of himself, and for a brief moment I think I’ve gone too far. But then I look back up and see that they don’t want me to stop, and so I don’t. Every once in awhile, I look to Ryan - checking to make sure that he’s okay with what I’m spilling, because a lot of it deals directly with him. I interpret his reactions to mean that I should continue, so I do. Ryan occasionally corrects me, and Julia occasionally asks questions, and we are still going strong when the restaurant closes.
We drive back to Ryan’s parents’ house, and hide in the basement. Ryan digs out old mixes that we made for each other, and we say a lot of the things that we’ve all been afraid to admit (to ourselves or each other) for the last seven years. Ryan sings Julia his father’s version of “Make Up My Heart”. Several times, I feel like we should stop, but the momentum just keeps us going until it’s not so early in the morning anymore. The funny thing is, if any of us had done anything differently, we wouldn’t still be together like we are. We probably wouldn’t still be friends, and so it seems like all of this might have been a necessary evil to get us where we are today. What a tangled web we weave.
Julia and I snuggle up on the fold-out couch to go to sleep. Ryan tucks us in. I’m 18 all over again.