Salt Touched

This used to be my playground
This used to be our pride and joy
This used to be the place we ran to…

I have often said in complete seriousness that my high school graduating class was by far the most apathetic in the school’s history. From kinder garden age we were set up as “the class of 2000” the “millennium grads”. We heard it so much that by the time graduation actually rolled around we felt as if we’d done it all before, and we were a class badly divided to begin with. Friendships formed in grade school were separated by the invisible line that ran – not so invisibly – between the two buildings of the school. Nominally “all one school” the truth was that the theatre, art rooms, choral rooms and band room were in one building, and the gym was in the other – with a long haul walk across the field in between separating them.

With everything that that implies.

High school is rarely a pleasant experience for anyone, even the prom queens and the football kings. I know I’m far from the only one who is not proud of who she was in those days. I was a theatre nerd who was never quite good enough for the lead, a closed off shy kid who was a serious pushy diva about her voice (yup, I knew how to talk my way into any solo) because my voice was basically all I had any confidence in. The freak voice. If that was what I had, that was what I may as well embrace. When my grad rolled around, I went to prom stag, walked across the stage in a ceremony I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember (I suppose, looking back, I already had my eyes on a much more important convocation some years later when I paced the stage at the end of university, and beyond even that…well, it was all a path to performance school in the end), and I moved up and on…setting my feet on the first steps of the journey that let me to where I am now.

I – like so many others – seldom looked back.

But when the message came out that the old buildings were being demolished to make way for a brand new state of the art building (something that I will admit, I suppose, was long overdue), I felt a strange clenching somewhere in my chest. I looked at the invitation to the farewell reunion and knew that – dammit – I was going back. I also knew no one else in the Millennium Class would, I don’t even know how many of us are still in town…but I passed a huge chunk of my formative years in those buildings, and I …knew I would go back. Even though it scared the heck out of me for reasons I may never be able to explain, I knew I would go back.

Head held high, no one on my arm, no one at my back. Yes, had Amras been in town there is absolutely no question that he would have gone with me, but I suppose some goodbyes you are perhaps best to say on your own.

“Yes, I made it. I turned out okay. See? Even the lowest of the low can climb higher than the top of the cheerleader pyramid.”

What I didn’t realize – because I simply never go into that area of town – was that they had already started building, had in fact nearly completed, the new structure. The vast expanse of the field that embodied the two very separate worlds of the old school is already obliterated by a huge towering structure of concreate and steele. The building of the old east wing completely blocked from view. But it wasn’t that building I cared about. It was the other, smaller, building that slowed my steps – the one that everyone forgets about because it’s smaller and the older grad classes from many years before me only care about the old high school. But it was the former junior high that meant the most to me, where I basically lived for 4 years, where I auditioned for my first show ever…where I quite literally found my voice.

I didn’t go in.

I should have. I would love to say that my footsteps rang down those old halls one more time, that I walked into the theatre and bid farewell to the multitudes of ghosts that hover there. But I didn’t. Possibly because I’m a coward, possibly because I know deep down, that you can’t ever go back. Life is short, we move on or we stall. Ask any pilot, stalling makes you spiral…and spiral isn’t something you ever want in your life.

Instead, I found myself in the “new” gym, listening to a lot of speeches saying a lot of things, the most accurate of which was “we come here to praise this school not to bury it”…and I saw not one signal person of my own class…though there were a scant few of the class before me scattered about, looking perhaps as lost as I felt in the sea of our elders to whom this place meant so much more.

Oddly, it was the teachers who remembered me, who recognized me from across the room, who greeted me with hugs and smiles and words of pride.

I found myself at the doors to the old high school by accident, having turned the wrong way trying to find my way out (and how strange did that feel, to suddenly not know which way to turn…). And tugged on them to find them locked; last set of tours for the day over. There was something bittersweet about that…though even hardpressed I could not put it into words.

And then I left.

And realized that the next time I see that piece of property, every trace of the place that helped raised me is going to be gone.

I may not be proud of who I was in high school, but I’m damn proud of who I have become; and whether I like it or not, I couldn’t have become the woman I am now without the girl I was then.

And so it goes…razzle dazzle sis-boom-ba.

Whenever I don my uniform for my shore-side job (which, being as how I conduct ghost tours, consists of head to toe black), I am presented with the continuing tendancy of human kind to snap-judge based on appearance.

People who would not normally notice me at all suddenly stare me down out of the corner of their eye, people shift away from me on the bus, seniors shuffle a distance apart from me in the grocery line up and seem honestly startled when I greet the clerk by name in a chipper normal voice and request nothing more than a chocolate bar and a sheet of bus tickets..

Simply because I am wearing black and have on dark lipstick.

The nights when I choose to wear red lipstick to work lessen the effect but only slightly.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that going around automatically trusting people who dress in head to toe jet in the middle of a bright spring day is a good habit to get into either; I’m not advising ignorance, and yet there continues to be something about this whole phenomenon that both puzzles and offends me. I am not unattractive when I’m in uniform (in fact, I look a lot prettier in my ‘night’ job uniform than I do in my ‘real’ one…but that’s beside the point), my smile is no less pleasant, my eyes are no less open, if you can be bothered to look past the black and actually make eye contact. It’s been my experience that until I have the microphone on and the walking stick in my hand, very few people do.

It just strikes me that we never really know who we’re judging. Every single person on this earth has darkness inside them, every single one of us has had terrible thoughts at some point, now, very few of us will ever follow those through, many are disgusted or terrified to admit they exist at all; but denying them is fruitless. Darkness is the natural foil of light, and both are part of the makeup of human nature. Part of the make-up of everything in the universe more like. My point (if I have one) is this: the truth is, outside appereances so seldom really reflect the person inside. The more terrifiying criminals in the world don’t go around dressed in cult-black most of the time; watch any crime show to be told that. The flip side of that? Those who do go around making a statement? There’s usually a reason behind that statement, and sometimes it’s not even as a big a deal as they think it is.

Take me for example, I went through a phase when black was my signature colour. When I never left the house without black make up and pretended not to care what people thought of it. Did that dull the fact that I’m a good person? Nope. Is all the emotional potential that fueled that choice still inside me and still a part of me? Yup. I just figured out a healthier way to deal with it. As did many people. But every person is a balance after all…

These days I only wear black once or twice a week for work, but it puts me in the unique position to remember what it’s like on the outside of the social acceptance circle.

So no, I don’t preach ignorance, I don’t advise trusting people your gut tells you not to trust, but I do advise questioning what is making you feel that way…and if it’s just their choice of lipstick colour? Maybe…just maybe…consider looking a little bit deeper…