A Brief Jaunt through the Looking Glass

So, as promised, here I am in the big O, still posting on my blog. I am so faithful. This has been quite the surreal trip up to this point, what with the sudden revelation that such a trip would even be possible, the rapid ticket buying and the exceedingly early flight (up at 4 in the AM, thank you very much). Just being here is strange. In some ways, Omaha changes very little from visit to visit, which is a blessing to someone like me, who is resistant to change. But I always come expecting more differences than what I find. I keep looking around for people I might recognize from back in the day, expecting to see people who have aged a good fifteen or twenty years in the one year that I have stayed away. That is not so much the case, and the constancy makes this place very therapeautic. As I said in my last post, I think there will be much benefit in making this trip backwards before I move forward into this next adventure. Most of all, I love being here with my friends. There is such an amazing difference between being with people with whom you have this much history and being with anyone else. There are so many stories, so many of which I had forgotten until I came back here for the reminder. The glorious thing is, not only do I remember them, but I am surrounded by others who could hear the same one-word trigger and we all have a similar flood. Inside jokes, memories, interruptions as we all add pieces to our communal past. The funny thing is, it's not like I've even known these people all my life. I realized that almost all of the stories that we tell are from those four short years of high school. When I think of it, I am already halfway through my four short years of college, and I feel like there are so few stories to tell. I would blame this primarily on the pandemic workaholism that plauges Houghton's campus, (and partly on my really, really crappy memory) but Hope was telling me that somehow, in high school, the stars just aligned and we got some things right. The right mix of people, the right mix of characters on our little stage of Omaha, and funny things would just happen. Why don't we have that anymore? Are we just not weird enough in college? This, again, makes me rather paranoid about my prospects of enjoying adult life. Then also, there was the massive revelation that somehow I was looked at as the one with the "charisma" that put me as the nucleus of our social group(other's words, not mine). Me, charismatic? Yeah right. This definitely deserves some more reflection, since that is not the role that I have held in any social group before or since. Anyway, you want to know what the best part has been, even just over the past couple of days? We get together and we sit in parks, or in living rooms, or on the hood of someone's car, and we just laugh and laugh and laugh.