▸ Column · Contemporary Japan, modern grounded
SASUKE UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Sasuke Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Naruto Uzumaki.
The letter
The invitation to my twentieth high school reunion showed up last week, and I wasn't ready for it. Just sitting there on the kitchen table next to the fruit bowl. My stomach dropped the same way it did when I was fourteen. The woman who organized the whole thing — Asuka — spent most of middle school calling me "Crater Face" across the cafeteria. Once poured a carton of chocolate milk down the back of my shirt at a school pep rally in front of everyone. The whole bleachers went up. I'm forty now. Married. I work as a dental hygienist and honestly things are pretty okay. Takumi says to just skip it and let it go, and I get what he means. But here's what I can't stop thinking about: she's probably forgotten every second of it. Every second. And I still flinch when I hear people laughing behind me in a convenience store line. I've typed out maybe six different responses to the invitation and deleted all of them. Part of me wants to walk in looking like things worked out fine — because they did — and make her remember. The other part wants to throw up in the parking lot before I even get inside. So do I show up and prove something to a woman who probably doesn't even remember my name? Or does staying home just quietly hand her one last win after all these years?
— Still Flinching in Sapporo
Sasuke Uchiha replies
You want to walk in and watch her recognize what she did to you. I understand that want. I chased something like it for most of my life, and I can tell you exactly what waits on the other side.
Nothing. Or close enough to nothing that the word fits.
Asuka probably has no memory of any of it. Which means the victory you're imagining — her face when she sees you — requires her to have been carrying this the way you've been carrying it. She hasn't. You'll walk in, she'll smile, and the blankness in her eyes will take something from you that the original cruelty never quite managed.
But notice something. You're not really asking about the reunion. You're asking why you still flinch in convenience store lines twenty years later. That's the actual question, and going or not going doesn't answer it.
The story you're living in — the one where Asuka has something to restore to you — is one you're maintaining. She isn't. She moved on from eighth grade; the question is whether you will.
Hn.
Go if you want. Stay home if you want. Neither changes what's actually happening: you gave her a kind of permanent residence in the part of you that still hears fourteen-year-olds laughing. Take that back. That is the only thing here worth doing.
Don't waste my time with comfortable answers. You already knew that.
— Sasuke Uchiha
Naruto Uzumaki weighs in
Sasuke's not wrong that she probably won't remember. But he's asking the wrong question.
This isn't about getting something back from Asuka. It's about whether you keep hiding. Ya know, I spent years being the kid everyone looked straight through — and every time I made myself smaller so nobody could see me stumble, the hurt got BIGGER. Not smaller.
Go to the reunion. Not for her. Go because you are forty years old with a husband and a career and a life you built, and you shouldn't have to let eighth-grade cruelty decide what rooms you're allowed to walk into. That's the whole thing.
Staying home isn't letting go. It's staying small where she can't see it. Walk in. If she remembers, fine. If she doesn't — and she probably doesn't — fine. You'll know you walked in. That's the part that stays with you. Believe it.
— Naruto Uzumaki
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