found drama

There’s some kind of reunion of St. Mary’s College students in this large outdoors area. We’re having a group picture taken on this particularly steep hill (which reminds me of the hill near the house my folks owned when I was really little). We’re all carefully positioned “just so” as though we spell out something in the wide-angle shot (or maybe our shirts are the individual pixels in some larger image). After the couple of shots are taken, we’re told that we can break and I move quickly to flee down the hill. I’m slightly claustraphobic around this many people and (frankly) I’m trying to distance myself from a number of them. Before I can get free though, someone grabs my arm. “Not so fast.” There are more pictures to be taken of a cadre of Honor’s students as well as some Q&A. I receive disdainful looks from several of the other surviving Honor’s students. It’s obvious that they don’t want me here. That I don’t fit in. No one makes any deriding remarks though. I do my best to sit still but the first chance I get, I spring down the hill, bounding away.

Once at the bottom of the hill, things have cascaded into a big party but people are spreading out into clusters and some have drifted back up the steep hill. I pause for a moment to consider how rude I’ve just been to the Honor’s students at the top (my supposed peers) and I bound back up the hill at a rate that’s nearly super-human. (It’s certainly quite a fast ascent for such a steep hill.) A feeling creeps over me as though the others feel like they’re being provoked and I wonder if I’m not provoking them intentionally but sub-consciously. Maybe they deserve it. Maybe they’ve had things too easy.

QUICK CUT: We’re away from the gathering and A. is just returning from a long trip. She’s quite late but explains that she could have been much later. She had to rent a car to get home because the person that was supposed to pick her up (the husband of a friend) created a great deal of extra work for himself and went to the wrong airport to pick her up. An airport that was 3 extra hours away.

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