Pages out of the past

Some time in April, something possesses me to look out my high school yearbooks. They sit unopened for weeks but finally, I pick them up and leaf through them for the first time in easily twenty years. There’s an eeriness about the shadowy faces, fixed in time with the same smiles or grimaces they had for that split second a quarter century ago, like distant echoes of long-silenced voices.

Memories are so elusive. They’re patchy and selective, and they’re filtered through their own futures. As I look at those faces out of my past, I experience a strange kind of double exposure effect: I see them as the faces of peers, through my adolescent self, and at the same time, I see them as those of children less than half my age. Looking at my own image, I wonder who that person really was, and what he would think of me.

When I smell the sweet, strong fragrance of guavas, I am immediately transported to a certain kitchen in a certain house in a certain town in South America. When I catch a whiff of kerosene, I instantly have the feeling that I am about to board a flight for some exotic destination. The effect of the grey images staring out at me from the pages of the yearbook is less overwhelming, but it is similar. They bring back snippets of long-forgotten memory: places, sounds, situations. Some faces bring back swirls of emotion: awakening desire, curiosity, confusion, guilt.

I begin to remember the repeated resolutions to avert my eyes, to avoid the unspeakable thoughts and feelings that plague my mind. Again and again my determination falters and I am carried away by the tide of my senses.

I begin to remember the constant, painful dissonance between the models I must conform to and the reality of the person I am deep inside — the despair of realizing that not only will I never be what my peers demand, but I am also failing to be what my family expects. Like the leper king, I must never be seen without my mask, and in my private moments I must be appalled at the monstrosity that stares out at me from the mirror.

I begin to remember the hollow feeling of being completely, hopelessly alone, of walking through the world in a kind of fog of aloneness.

I want to go back and talk to that earlier self, tell him everything will be alright. But I know it won’t be. There’s nothing I can say to him that will make things alright. He isn’t ready to hear what I have to say to him. And yet, perhaps just one word of reassurance, one understanding ear, one safe place where he can say the truth out loud — perhaps that would make a difference. I’ll never know. For him, it’s too late.