Forgotten, But Not Gone

No more than five minutes after my high school graduation ceremony ended, I, along with hundreds of my classmates, boarded a bus en route for Project Graduation — a lock-in designed to keep high school seniors safe graduation night. The event wasn’t mandatory and I remember not particularly wanting to attend, but someone (my parents, probably) convinced me at the last moment that Project Graduation would be, in all likelihood, the last time I saw most of my classmates.

This same fact was repeated during our bus ride back back to the high school the following morning. “Look at the person immediately to your left,” said a teacher sitting near the front of the bus, “and now look to your right. Odds are, you will never see one of those two people ever again.” Not only do I remember her words so clearly, but I also remember the two people who were sitting on either side of me. Back in 1991 (the year I graduated high school) this statistic probably held true. Four years later, in 1995, I logged on to the World Wide Web for the first time. Today, on Facebook, I am friends with both of those people that were sitting near me on the bus, plus almost everyone else who was on the bus, and at least a dozen of my former teachers. But yeah, without the internet, that teacher was probably right. If anything, her estimate might have been low.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I made up a game where we would cover up all the names in our old yearbooks and then flip through the pages and name as many of our old classmates as we could. Not only did I frequently score 100% on these self-tests, I remember wondering how anyone could forget someone they had just spent nine months with!

Eventually, it happened. One day while looking through an older yearbook, I realized I could no longer name every single person. I still did pretty well, but a few of the faces (mostly belonging to students who had moved away) no longer seemed familiar. Back then, stealing a peek at their name was all it took to jog my memory, but as the years go by, I must admit that some of those faces don’t seem familiar to me at all, even after reading their names.

Of course a lot of those kids, especially all the ones I was friends with, I’ll never forget. One of those kids was named Chris.

Now, I’ve written about Chris before. In second grade, my best friend (Andy Willrath) moved out of state for a year. The year he was away, I made a new friend: Chris. Chris and I shared similar interests and liked all the same kinds of toys. (In third grade, that’s enough to base a solid friendship on.) For the year Andy was gone, Chris became my new best friend. At the end of that school year, Andy and his family moved back to Oklahoma, and Chris moved away. For one year, Chris was the friend I needed. And after he moved away, I was convinced I would never see or hear from him again.

Then, you know — the internet. AOL. MySpace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. To say I spent years searching for Chris online makes me sound like some kind of stalker, which I am not. It’s not like the first thing on my mind every morning was finding this guy. It was more like, late at night when I was on the web or social media and in one of those “let’s see who I can find” moods, I would occasionally punch his name into a search engine. Over time, especially as more and more people got online, I pretty much found every single person I was looking for.

Except Chris.

Making things even more difficult was this guy with the exact same name, who specializes in “online media marketing” and has flooded every possible search engine with thousands of links to his accounts and articles. Every link on Google, Facebook, and Twitter that I found led back to this guy, and not the Chris I was looking for.

And then one day out of the blue, I found him — on LinkedIn, of all places. I was updating my LinkedIn resume and searching for IT people to network with when, for whatever reason, I typed his name into the search box at the top of the screen. Three or four entries down in the results, I saw a familiar face looking back at me — a face I hadn’t seen since third grade. It was definitely him.

I wanted to contact Chris immediately but wasn’t sure where to begin. “So, whaddaya been up to the past 38 years?” is an awkward opening line. Instead, I crafted a brief message expressing that I would love to get in contact with him. I had questions (Where did you move away to? What do you do now? Tell me about your family!) and stories of my own to share. I ended my initial message with my email address, and a burning desire to know how his life had turned out.

Here is the response I got back, in its entirety:

“That’s me. I think i remember you from 2nd or 3rd grade. Take care.”

I have read and re-read that response at least a dozen times over the past month. In my initial contact I included my email address (which also contains this domain name), meaning that along with LinkedIn, there are three ways Chris could contact me back. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. No fun memories about how we used to love UFOs and building LEGO spaceships. No comment about the girl we both had a crush on, or questions about any of our former classmates. No nothing.

I struggled with what to do next. Should I contact him again? Had I said something wrong? Had our friendship not ended the way I remembered? Had we not been as close as I thought? Finally, a revelation worse than all those hit me.

Maybe he doesn’t remember me.

Not remember me? We were great friends… or at least I think we were. I began to run through my memories of Chris. Maybe he hadn’t come over to visit as many times as I originally thought. I remember going to his birthday party… or was that someone else’s that we just both happened to be attending? I remember playing with Chris, sure, but our visits outside of school were few and far between. Maybe he played with lots of other kids, too, and I was just one of the crowd.

It stings a little realizing you’re the face in the yearbook that somebody forgot.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have any hard feelings toward Chris. If he ever wants to catch up or reminisce, if only for a day, he knows how to get a hold of me. And if not, at least one of us has some pretty great memories from that year.

Take care, indeed.