A last thought
I was undeniably fat in high school. I was fat when I started high school, and by the time I finished, I was even fatter. I lost a lot of weight before I started college, and then put a lot of it back on during college. Since graduating college, my weight has fluctuated some, but I've pretty much maintained the same ballpark size and shape -- thinner, healthier and in better shape than I ever was in high school.

So, when I was anticipating my high school reunion, the one thing I didn't worry about was looking worse than I did in high school. I mean, c'mon, I've also discovered the wonders of plucking my eyebrows and using a hairdryer. I've had nowhere to go but up.

And I've already intimated that my high school reunion was a great time. And it was. There's just this one incident ...

The bar was crowded. We were drunk. There was one door between the private room and the main room, and the area was narrow, crowded, hard to navigate and kind of in a corner. So everyone was in everyone else's way. And I'm either coming or going and waiting for someone to get out of my way so I could get out of someone else's way. And this guy I went to high school with is trying to get by, too, and pushes and shoves and when he gets by me, mutters rather loudly and clearly some sentence including the words "fat fuck".

And there in two words was one big thing I was dreading about reunion -- the return of feelings of being judged for one facet of who you are (appearance, weight, height, etc.) that doesn't reveal the true you. The sense that there was this true you within that wasn't discovered or appreciated or given a chance. This wasn't my complete high school experience because my high school friends were really great. But I was fat, and for that I was teased, even by some people who were nominally my friends. While I feared these feelings coming back, I wasn't expecting the actual name calling that happened in my childhood to happen in a bar in New York City. I went to reunion not expecting that immature shit, but rather, I was expecting awkward interactions with people we've shared a kind of dirty, humililating past with. Yes, we were bullies or awkward anti-sociods back then, but we've all grown up and become adults, become more and better than we were in high school. In a sense, going to reunion meant facing the awkward teen in us that we've outgrown. Well, all of us except for one greasy fuck.