It would have made sense not to go at that point. As soon as I decided to take the title "suicidal", I became the walking scarlet letter around that joint. But it was my last semester and the last real shindig our class would share. I would be damned if I made it easy on them though, which would explain the thick black eyeliner and Doc Martins with only the small concession of a skirt...also black.
A small group of us went together for old time's sake. It was mostly the original clan from the pre-college wilderness trip and we had mostly not talked for the last two years. Preemptive nostalgia is a powerful thing it turns out.
My well-developed cynicism found validation in the saccharine superlatives of the class council presiding over the fete. About the only thing I found the inner bright-eyed freshman reviving for was the mention of the Power Outage Day. This had occurred spring semester, our first year and was the one thing that brought the 700 or so of us together in memory. Early on a Tuesday morning, one of the main transformers had exploded and wiped out power on the entire campus. Classes for the day canceled. This coincided with the first sunny day warm enough for ultimate Frisbee and optimistic sunbathing on the quad. My boyfriend and I hopped the Metra into the city and found a tattoo parlor to get the navel piercing I had been promising him. Deep dish pizza followed that I can still taste with the adrenaline of flesh newly punctured.
It is a memory deeply marred by retrospect and regret, but I was already distant enough at that last senior banquet to hold it for a moment with the rest of them as a picture of glorious freedom.
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