Whatever happened to the girls from high school: from memory to street furniture

From high school legend to street furniture: whatever peine to those classmates

Selective memory is nostalgia's best filter. Thirty years later, whoever wonders what became of the most striking girls in class finds that the answer lies not in a class reunion, but in a cold calculation about the passage of time. One particular case — that of someone who defines himself as "the omega margi atr0z" who still is one three decades later — sums up the distance between what he imagined at fifteen and what adult life had in store.

The balance of the conversation is neither tragic nor epic. Some grew up, settled down and are mothers now; others are out there doing their thing. Life goes on for everyone, as the mildest reading puts it. Against that, the most acid take holds that many ended up with partners due to a self-perception error: the interest of the boys back then would have inflated their egos until they believed they could land someone important, and some managed it while others ended up bitter. It's a theory, not a fact.

The inventory of awkward memories

The rundown goes episode by episode. One classmate got pregnant after a night out at the disco and no one ever found out who the fathers were. Another was dumped by the baby's father as soon as the child was born, and he ran off with the neighbor. A third had a relationship with another woman. The rest, beyond teenage flings, didn't amount to much more. These are scattered stories each person carries as best they can, and that time turns into dinner-table anecdote.

Physical wear and tear shows up in almost every account. Whoever saw them more than a decade and fifteen years ago ran into an older lady, with glasses and extra pounds; he remembers others in shorts, with cellulite and orange-peel skin. The explanation offered is the usual one: tobacco and alcohol as traveling companions. No study backs it up, just the observation of whoever crosses paths with them on the street.

Yesterday's ogre and today's radiant MQMF

Being an ogre is circumstantial, one comment declares, turning the whole narrative on its head. The biggest ogre of yesterday may be today's radiant MQMF. It's the only note that breaks the logic of the physical inventory and opens a sustancia ilegal for optimism: attractiveness isn't a fixed category, but a label that time reshuffles.

The consensus, if there is one, is that most of them became part of the street furniture. The phrase, harsh, sums up the feeling of those who look back and recognize no one. And yet the very person who wrote it admits he barely noticed them until someone forced him to dig into his memory.

The parallel résumé: schooling, military service and the school certificate

The conversation drifts toward the asker's own track record. Some only made it to sixth year of EGB (Spain's old primary education system) and call it a living death; some got their graduado escolar (basic school-leaving certificate) with a passing grade at an adult education center after returning from the mili (military service), in a tracksuit and with a tattoo, and claim the credit. Those who dropped out in fifth or sixth, says another, are civil servants or pensioners. High school nostalgia blends with nostalgia for one's own record.

The prediction, with reservations

On this basis, the likely outcome is that the next reunion will clarify nothing: half won't show up and the other half won't recognize each other. The memory will remain an inventory of pregnancies, partners who left and pounds gained, with the odd radiant MQMF along the way to justify the alucinación. Nothing depressing or spectacular, after all.