Stop inviting me to your reunions. I won't be attending |
There's no polite way to say this. You need to stop with the emails. No matter how warm and well-meaning, they always feel like a subpoena disguised as an invitation. They provoke an urgent desire to fake my own disappearance. Instead I simply hit the delete button.
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I don't care if we were school friends half a century ago, worked in the same building a decade ago or shared nothing more profound as children than a postcode.
I won't be attending any of the endless reunions you plan on inviting me to.
Not because I'm aloof, carry scars, am burdened with deep-seated resentments or suffer from a superiority complex. For some of us the past just doesn't feel like a place worth revisiting.
Look, I get it. It's no accident that the reunion industry is booming among people of my generation. Nostalgia is our new emotional currency. As our futures grow shorter our pasts appear larger and safer because they no longer demand anything of us.
But memory is an untrustworthy and highly selective editor. It softens the petty cruelties and deletes those long stretches of insecurity and awkwardness we were forced to endure. It produces a flattering highlight reel as misleading as a two-minute movie trailer. It's why the "good old days" are never hailed as such at the time; they're only branded 'good' when the discomfort of living through them has passed.
Reunions thrive on this distortion, becoming nothing more than a collective agreement to replace fact with false sentiment. Those we drifted away from are recast as "unfinished friendships" rather than relationships that faded for perfectly sound reasons: we were never that close in the first place or simply didn't like each other.
Great friendships evolve and endure. The rest dissolve, having served their purpose. A reunion tries to replace what the passing of years gently removed because it was no longer important to us. It's an attempt to create a social version of Frankenstein, stitching together parts that died naturally years before.
And yet every few months one of your emails arrives filled with so much optimism and enthusiasm it makes attendance feel compulsory. "So many memories," you write.........