I’ve now gone back for two high school reunions, which takes some explaining.

The Class of 2016 was my class. Those were the people I came up with, and the ones I was supposed to walk the stage beside. But three weeks into our senior year, a car accident took a third of my skull, and my senior year disappeared into a coma and a rehab wing in Indianapolis. I finished school from home, and technically graduated in December of 2015. So I belong, in a strange way, to both classes and neither of them. I didn’t have a senior year with 2016, and I was never truly part of 2015 except on paper.

Last summer the Class of 2015 had its ten year reunion, and I wrote about my experience here.

Yesterday the Class of 2016 held theirs and it was combined with North & East (which was a wonderful thing!)

I thought I knew what I was there for, but I was wrong about where it would come from.

I expected the closure to come from former high school classmates. Instead it came from W.D. Richards Elementary.

The memories I made under that saw-tooth roofline have outlasted so many others, and in a way high school never quite did. Perhaps because they came pre-adolescence and so long before the accident. Regardless of why, it’s true those Richards kids have stayed with me, if not relationally, at least cerebrally.

I hadn’t spoken to some of them in 15 years. Maybe a few passing “hellos” in the hallway or at rivalry basketball games. That was it.

Yet with a single look across a crowded bar on Saturday evening in Columbus and it was like no time had passed. It brought me back to the playground with the chain link nets, the classroom with Mrs. Walker, the eraser wars, and the Yahoo email chain that kept our conversations going after class. Those people meant the world to me when I was 10, and it turns out they still do at 28.

Almost the entire night was other people handing me back pieces of my own life.

The only girl I ever went to a school dance with reminded me how that eighth-grade night actually went. We “danced” maybe two minutes when my eye started hurting and I realized I had gotten cologne in it! It stung so badly that I had to call my mom to come pick me up early. I’d forgotten it completely, and the memory was retold multiple times throughout the night. It brought a lot of laughter.

Another person reminded me that I “just showed up” at Richards in fifth grade, the homeschooled kid walking into a class that had been together since kindergarten, and told me she still remembered it a decade and a half later.

Someone told me she’d been at my wedding, and I hadn’t realized it. That’s a piece of one of the most important days of my life, kept safe in her memory because I couldn’t keep it in mine.

And someone reminded me of a nickname she gave me in middle school, which I held onto all night and finally handed back to her on the sidewalk as we left, to the whole group’s delight.

The high school years are genuinely blurry to me. The injury took a lot of them. Which means the people who knew me back then are keepers of a version of myself I can’t fully reach on my own. This is fitting with the relational anthropology I’ve been writing and speaking about for the past decade: No one can be themselves by themselves.

When one of them remembers something about who I was, they’re handing me back a piece I’d lost. I didn’t understand that this was the thing I actually needed. Not to be remembered. To be given back my own memory, by the only people who still hold it.

A few of them I have to name:

Vedant, who just made the move to Chicago: it meant more than you know to see your face in that room, and I’m rooting for you hard as you build something new in a city that doesn’t know you yet. It will. Give it time.

Konnor, it was so good to catch up, to hear about your family, and to meet your wife. Wishing you both every good thing as you make your life in Indianapolis.

Hayden, congratulations on the promotion. It’s earned. I’ve watched the way you work since high school, and none of it surprises me. Keep going.

And Coy, thank you for holding it down in Columbus, and for being such a genuine treat to spend the evening with. Catching the tail end of the night at a table with you was my favorite part of the whole thing, and I mean that.

And to the rest of you, the ones I didn’t get enough time with and the ones who couldn’t make it: you are not a footnote to my memory of that place. Some of you are load-bearing, and you have no idea.

If the last ten years have been harder than you expected, hear this from someone who nearly didn’t get them: whatever you’re carrying can be carried, and you’re not meant to carry it alone. You are not the distance between who you thought you’d be at 18 and who you actually are today. You were worth exactly as much on your hardest day this year as you were the day we graduated.

I believe the human person is a soul and not a function, not a job title or a marital status or a salary or a story other people tell when you’re not in the room. A reunion can sort people into those things faster than almost anywhere, everyone reduced to what they’ve become in a two-minute conversation. I’d rather do the opposite. I’d rather see people, and let them see me, and let the boy I was at ten and the man I am now stand in one room and agree that the past we had together was real and worth keeping. And in my case, that other people are the ones who kept it.

So if you were there last night, thank you. You gave me back something I’d been missing for a decade, and most of you never knew you were holding it. If you weren’t, the door stays open. Find me.

And if no one has told you lately that your life carries weight, not for anything you’ve done but simply because you are still here to be one of us: it was true the day we first met and it will be true long after the next reunion empties out.

You have always been worth remembering.

Note: the header photo for this essay is from junior year at CNHS. My senior picture is not in the Class of 2016 yearbook, given the circumstances described above.