An old friend from high school contacted me recently. She had been gone from social media for a while and she burned her WhatsApp a while ago. After a few years, she was back, and she brought back many memories from high school that I've forgotten.
I had a crush on her. I was a depressed and anxious kid with undiagnosed autism and bipolar disoder. I was a trans egg, but I still didn't know that at the time.
I remember one day she asked me to go study for a test with her. We went near the auditorium and stayed there studying and talking and listening to indie music together. She liked the same songs as I did, and I did like some very weird stuff. I always bonded through music, and listening to music together was nice.
Before that, I don't think I had ever been closer to another girl. She was the first person to enjoy my presence.
I keep trying to remember what was life in high school. It was surely depressing, but the melancholia of being a teenager in a big city, growing up and growing old, makes me want to remember.
It feels like a dream. Those dreams that we have and that we forget after we wake up. We try very, very hard to remember them.
I still live in the same neighborhood as I did in high school. I keep looking around places, whenever I commute around, and I try to remember things. I remember things with rose tinted glasses. I remember songs I heard, people I met, how I felt. Was I tired, depressed, annoyed, sad, happy?
Why do I have to remember things? Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it feels like I needed to do something about my life as early as I could. Sometimes it feels like I should've gotten my shit together about gender and mental health way back in high school. I like to fantasize about how life would've been if I were a girl back in high school. Would I have dated someone? Would I have had some nice adventures? Why did I waste so much time??