RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Down With the Past!

A few months ago, I noticed a box put out to trash on my neighbor’s curb. I don’t pick through the garbage as much as I used to, but this box was full of books and I couldn’t resist. It was mostly college texts and crappy novels, but mixed in with them I found a high school yearbook.

Its front cover was embossed with the owner’s name. The inside pages were filled with messages from her acquaintances. While I don’t find much good in excessive attachment to the past – especially the high school past – I still had a hard time understanding why someone would throw away their yearbook. Even an embittered sentiment-less bastard keeps their yearbook stashed somewhere in the back of their closet. Even if you never look at it, open it, read it or think about it, you keep it.

I could only think of 2 reasons to throw it away, death or a willful attempt to forget. Since I like mysteries, I stuffed it in my bag and took it home for review.

When I got home and opened it up to investigate, the yearbook felt vaguely familiar. It was exactly as old as my own and from the same general place. The students were all my age. They had the same hairstyles and listened to the same crappy 90’s bands that my own classmates listened to.

What I found out about the owner was remarkable only in its banality. There was nothing extraordinary or particularly interesting about it or her. She had immigrated to the United States at some point during childhood. Judging by her name, I decided that she was born in a Scandinavian country to a locally born mother and British or American father. By the time she was in high school, they’d moved to the Philadelphia suburbs.

The messages were dull, even by high school yearbook standards. People called her brave for moving to the United States and most of them repeated things like “even though you were so quiet” or “we didn’t get to know each other too well, but…” The only unusual thing was the dearth of male signatures. It was a co-ed school, but only girls signed her yearbook. There were no exceptions.

Was her time in high school lonely? She had no apparent close friends and she had no boy, friends or boyfriends at all. Was there nothing in her memory valuable enough to keep the yearbook packed away in some box?

Or did no boys sign because she didn’t like them to begin with? Was high school a time spent locked up in some self-imposed shell? Had her life since high school blossomed into something that made those years expendable? Did she look back on them as wasted or worthless time unworthy of a place on her bookshelf?

Had something happened in her life that made her want to abandon her old life completely? Was she moving on with a clean slate? Was this book in the trash part of some much larger purge?

Or maybe it wasn’t her yearbook at all. Maybe it belonged to an old roommate, who moved out in a rush or on bad terms. Maybe it just got lost in the shuffle and eventually, tossed out completely.

In the end, I actually don’t actually care. Mostly I like telling stories and imagining scenarios.