Feeling: musing
Listening to: watching senseless cable TV
Reading/Watching: nothing

Home, to deliver souvenirs from Chicago, pick up my TASP scores, and see the family.

I'm actually getting a kick out of the fact that the teacher education department at my school will receive my scores, be looking over the rows of 100% marks, and then file it under my ID number and realize, "oh... she dropped our program a month ago." (Haha... I'm so snotty sometimes.)

I was out walking the dog (God, he's getting old... this summer he'll be 11), and bumped into a guy from highschool, out walking his dog.

It would have been nice, to bump into a friend, maybe Edward or Rachel, but no, it was this guy I've known since kindergarten, Andy. When we were five, I remember him having a much bigger head. It was abnormally large. Now it fits his body better. But looking at him, he looked just the same. When I was seven, I had a crush on him because he gave me a Valentine with a piece of candy on it (I didn't realize he'd given one to everybody). When I was nine, he beat me in the school spelling bee and gloated all year. When I was ten, he and three of his friends used to chase me home on their bikes. I remember one time he had leftovers from his lunch box and had the bright idea to throw half an apple at me. It hit me on the back and I fell off my bike. Scraped my hands.

He looked at me, and paused, but couldn't remember my name. While he was searching, trying to guess, I had all these memories running through my head, on past junior high when he told me I was too ugly to run for student council, and highschool when we pretty much mutually ignored each other's existence. And finally he smiled, snapped his fingers, and said, "Katie!"

He blamed the bad memory on the fact that I didn't have glasses or braces anymore, and was tactful enough not to mention that my hair was tamer and redder, and I'd lost about thirty pounds. For some reason, he seemed genuinely glad to see me, asking all about college and my major and singing, etc, and we made smalltalk for ten or fifteen minutes. He even asked if I had a boyfriend, and right about then I decided it was cold and I needed to keep walking or my dog would run off. Don't ask why it was that question that gave me the sudden urge to run away, but it was.

It's such a loaded question. Nowhere near as loaded as any and all possible answers, though. Which was why I murmured something about taking time off from "drama," and said I'm sorry but I have to go, it was good to see you, talk to you later sometime maybe, etc, retreated. Made a joke about seeing him at the ten-year reunion. Smalltalk can be so exhausting.

This just reinforces my curiosity about what people would say, people who knew me my whole life, if they could see me now. That is, if they remember who I am. I seem to have faded out of existence, to them. I'm still deciding whether that fade was intentional or not.

I don't burn my bridges, I just leave them to rot.

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