The People Who Knew Us Then
What remains when we meet again after decades
Yesterday evening I sat around a table with people I went to school with.
There are decades between the people we were then and the people sitting there now. Whole lives have happened in between: work, families, relationships, different cities, good decisions and bad ones, things we planned and many more we never saw coming.
And still, there was that immediate sense of recognition.
Of course we have changed. It would be strange if we hadn’t. But meeting people from much earlier in our lives has its own particular quality. They remember a version of us that no longer exists in quite the same way, and we remember theirs.
They knew us before much of the biography had been written.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they know us better than people we met later. I don’t think length alone creates intimacy, and history is not the same thing as closeness. But history is a form of knowledge of its own.
There are references that need no explanation. A school corridor. A teacher. A particular year. A story everyone remembers slightly differently. Things that would mean very little to anyone outside that room.
Then you sit across from one another many years later and become aware not only of what you remember, but of everything that has happened since.
That interests me more than nostalgia.
I don’t particularly want to go back. The girl I was at school is not the woman I am now, and I wouldn’t want her life again. But she isn’t a stranger to me either.
She already had some of the instincts I still recognise today. She got other things completely wrong. She knew less, hoped differently and had no idea where life would take her.
Seeing people who knew that version of me is a reminder of how gradually a life is built.
We tend to look at ourselves from the point at which we are standing now: the work we do, the relationships we have, the place we live, the things currently occupying our thoughts. People from much earlier in our lives quietly put all of that back into perspective.
They knew us before most of those things existed.
And for an evening, your life suddenly feels longer than its present chapter.
We are not only who we are today
There is also something rather nice about allowing old relationships to become whatever they have become.
Not every school friendship has to last for life. Some people belong entirely to a particular period, and I don’t think there is anything sad about that.
Others remain in a looser way. You might not see one another regularly. Years can pass. Then somebody organises a dinner, everyone arrives carrying several decades of additional life, and conversation begins again.
There is no need to recreate what once was.
In fact, that would probably be disappointing.
The interesting part is meeting one another as we are now, while still having access to that much older layer underneath.
Yesterday there were faces around the table that I had known when we were very young. Nobody was exactly the person I remembered.
Neither was I.
And yet we recognised one another.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet pleasures of growing older: discovering that some people can belong to an earlier version of your life without belonging only to the past.
You can meet again in the present and see both at once — who somebody was, and who they have become.
Rooted in Depth. Radiating Light.
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