fox | remembrance of things past

zoethe have set today's meme: what would your self-from-eleven-years-ago think of you, if she turned up now? What would she think of what you've done with her life? Etc.

I've been thinking about it for a little bit and I can't even remember what I was doing eleven years ago -- it was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, so I was dating Paw Boy, but I just can't remember what I was doing with my days. In my senior year I worked evenings and weekends at Baskin-Robbins, and I guess I may have had that job in the summer. It doesn't really matter, apart from without remembering where I was and what I was doing, it's hard to think what my expectations would have been for eleven years from then, i.e. now. I knew (not just expected) that I wouldn't be there forever, neither living at home nor working at the ice cream place nor dating Paw Boy, bless him, but I wasn't able to think too far into the future. I knew (not just expected) I'd go to college, but I didn't know where, and I didn't know what I'd do after, or where I thought I'd be now.

But. 1994!Fox would be pleased to know that her college applications would be successful and she'd go and be a relatively happy undergraduate. She'd be surprised, I think, to learn that she'd grow so much closer to the friends she was about to make in college than she was to the friends she was so close to in high school -- not, you understand, that she didn't expect to acquire close friends in college, but she'd be surprised to hear that she'd fall out of touch with so many close friends from high school. I'm glad to be in touch with as many friends from high school as I am, but she'd be surprised I don't keep up with more of them. I think she'd be sorry to know that the road to graduate school was such a bumpy one, and she'd probably be disappointed in me for still not really knowing what I intend to do when I'm done, but I hope she'd be appropriately impressed that her resume would one day have a line that said University of Oxford.

She would, it must be said, be sorry to know that she'd still be single today. It's not that she'd think that without a husband and a family she'd accomplished nothing -- I hope she'd agree that I hadn't wasted the intervening eleven years, and if she didn't, I'd smack her upside the head and briskly -- but she'd be sorry that the fact of being single in her late 20's wasn't a choice she'd made for herself, but something that had happened to her, and she'd be sorry it would occasionally bother her as much as it does.

I would extract from her an apology for the way she dressed.

She would be startled to learn that she was to become such a victim of seasonal allergies.

As well, she would be devastated to learn that her grandmother was going to die in two and a half months, so I think I wouldn't tell her.

remembrance of things past

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