I never knew what to write in people’s yearbooks in high school. I wasn’t eloquent enough to state my feelings plainly and I was afraid of the alternatives: overly-sentimental messages that made me cringe or vapid goodbyes that made me question the strength of my friendships. But when my friends always finished their messages in my yearbook and could only wait for so long, I’d scribble something along the lines of “Remember the night we…” or “I could not have asked for a better roommate” and hand the bulky yearbook back, feeling fake.
I signed more yearbooks during Senior Night, held three days before high school graduation, than any other day in my life. Everyone else seemed ready to end high school with a bang, laughing and shouting on the mechanical bull and the inflatable obstacle course. The dark empty dorms on the walk over to the gym had made me sad, so I occupied myself in the corner where people sat signing yearbooks.
I’d become comfortable with the limitations of my writing by that point in my life, but the stakes were too high for clichés that night. Those messages were supposed to cement my high-school friendships in a moment of time before life whisked them away. Each time I failed to do that, I felt the friendship prematurely snatched from me then and there. At the end of the night, I had signed over 50 yearbooks and felt emptier than I had felt since freshman year.
Still, I clung to the hope that my friends were able to say in their written goodbyes what had eluded me. I desperately wanted to open my book and find that the relationships in my life had meant as much to others as they had meant to me. The last three years of my life would be validated, I was sure, by notes hastily scribbled in heavy Sharpie and light blue glitter.
I thought I would need these notes more during the long summer months when I would be alone at home, so I promised myself not to read the messages until time had passed. Anytime I carried my yearbook for the rest of the week, I held it tightly shut, afraid that the book would accidentally fall open.
Then on a sunny day in June, without meaning to, I graduated. I also smoked my first cigar, a thick Cuban that a friend’s dad had picked up while on a business trip to Canada. It left a bitter taste in my mouth, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The European backpacking experience came next, and when I returned home three weeks later, with scruffy facial hair and a newly-discovered passion for the World Cup, I had forgotten all about my unread yearbook. Summer took over my life and it was only when I was finally unpacking on a humid night in July that I rediscovered the book and recalled the promise I had made to myself.
It was heavier than I remembered. My light was the only one on in the house as I laid on my bed and started to read. The messages I read were no different than the hastily scribbled notes I had guiltily penned months ago. Strangely, their contents didn’t matter to me. The notes brought me back to Senior Night, not to the sadness, but to the people I loved who were all around me. It took me an hour to get through all six pages and by the time I set the book aside, it felt much lighter.
