Past will come back to get you

I've been starting and not finishing a few posts. They are saved somewhere in here and I'll probably end up deleting them because the righteous anger than started them has dissipated like steam in the desert.
Right now, I'm contemplating my past.
I'm on Facebook. I got dragged in by Husband and some friends. I play Scrabulous with friends, talk smack with others, have a little green patch I update daily. And I'm discovering a past I thought I had left behind.
But, you never leave your past behind, do you? You can change your name, your look, your location but you still find yourself a little haunted by who you once were. Then you get to a certain point in your life where you realise that you don't care about the person people thought you were. And you are willing to say hello to the people you liked, the people who you should have told that you thought were fabulous or the people that you moved away from emotionally and socially when you were a teen.
I've connected with people who have known me nearly four decades. It's strange to have conversations with people who have settled into the familiar of our old home county with lives less ordinary. To chat amicably about people who made your life difficult in your youth and wonder what became of that pain in the ass. I get contemplative in this world.
There are people who I wasn't close to in high school but whom I admired. When I connected with them via Facebook or Classmates or whatever, I have told them that I admired their spirit, their sense of self, their sass. They are surprised, some times even a little touched, that I even felt that way because they had a sense of self that was completely hidden from view. One of the women I recently connected with on Facebook said she hated going to school in our little white washed world. She considered herself a great actress for pretending to enjoy life day to day in a world where she was paprika in a field of sea salt. I understood but in a different way. She's a success in her life but I detected a small sense of apology that she wasn't married or had any kids to show for our four decades of life. I told her that it's not that important as long as you are happy with the life you're in.
Another friend I connected with on Facebook dated the two girls I was best friends with. One for a matter of months and the other for two years. We chatted for several days via email about how one was vanilla with a sprinkling of jimmies and the other was just nuts. The nuts one seemed to linger in his mind the longest and therefore, our conversations. I told him I had to cut her loose not long after we graduated from high school because I couldn't be the person she wanted me to be. Her life was too damaged and she wanted me to be the person to fix it all up so she didn't have to take responsibility for it. But after awhile, I couldn't deal with her pleading for me to pick her up from yet another stupid error she made (like having her battered old sedan towed away because she parked it in a no parking zone 15 miles from her house but 100 miles from where I lived). It was hard enough for me to figure out who I was going to be away from the cage of the small town I grew up in without having to be a Mother to a woman/child.
This guy who had been her boyfriend for two years had run into her a couple of years after graduation and said she had found some peace in her life with a guy in the Bay Area. She apologized for the flaming hoops she had put him through and he said she seemed to be happy for once in her life. I think there is a part of him who was still enraptured by the sprite quality she liked to use to ensnare people. Having been her best friend for three years in high school, I knew her routines well.
She has gone deep undercover. I've tried to hunt her down to no avail. I found the other best friend (who I also axed that fateful summer after high school simply because she and I were geographically challenged and that she wanted me to put my graduation trip on hold so I could amuse her for three days after I had told her that there was no way I would do it). She is living a life similar to the one she was living when we were young. She is engrossed in a world of make believe with her husband who she met via her ethereal sensibilities. Another damaged soul who survived a Dad who had a local celebrity status and a Mom who alternately basked and hated that glow because she wanted it on her own. This Mom would send out yearly letters to other friends' parents about how her family was doing so beautifully - how her eldest son was working in the kitchen of a top chef (rather than say that he was a dishwasher at a restaurant because he had flunked out of community college) or how her youngest son was researching alternative forms of education (rather than say he flunked out of high school and wanted to follow Phish in a VW Eurovan).
Tonight, I happen to see that Facebook had found some more of the names from my past. People I have always wondered where they had gone to. I'm too timid to find out if they would take an email from me since they held me in great disdain when I was a high school student. One I would love to tell that a cartoon he drew for our school paper really helped me get perspective in life and helped me deal with my teen years better than I might have done otherwise.
In fact, I think I will...