A Eulogy and a Study in Isolation

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

An old classmate messaged me the minute I sent her a friend request, and that was pretty unusual. Perhaps it shouldn't be, but it was.

I came across her profile when a bunch of pictures were uploaded, featuring other old classmates who are on my friend list, and who were celebrating the engagement of an old classmate. I wasn't particularly surprised by the engagement (also unusual), but this was because I'd been told about it in advance. 

And then I wondered who this D.M. was, who had uploaded the pictures. I certainly did not know any D.M. The profile picture wasn't clear, but as I went through the pictures and noted that D.S. was in them, the dreadful truth began to dawn on me. I went to her profile to see whether my suspicions were true, and realized I wasn't even friends with her on Facebook. I sent her a request that she immediately accepted, and thus we come full circle to how I came to be speaking to her. 

It didn't take her very long to tell me she'd gotten married last month, which is how she'd gone from D.S. to D.M. Let's be clear - S is her father's first name, M is her husband's first name. They're not even family names. These names don't represent legacies - they just represent people? 

And why not, yeah? Why not have your name represent people? But if that logic were to be applied, then why D.S. or D.M.? Why not D.(Whatever her mother's first name is).? Why not a sister, or a best friend? Or conversely, Why didn't M.V. become M.D.? Why couldn't this M have taken D as his surname? 

So, no. These names aren't just superficial representation of some important people in your lives. They are always, exclusively, the father and the husband. 

My sense of isolation always increases when I realize that nobody else seems to feel that this may be even slightly problematic. 

And when I say "nobody else" I mean DM and TBC and HJ and AMA and SE and BRT...

I mean all of our old classmates - the same ones DM eagerly enquired as to whether I was still in touch with. 

How can I be? I wanted to ask her. But I doubt that was necessary. The question and its answer are both self evident - evident in who I am, evident in every aspect of my life. I couldn't hide it even if I wanted to try, as my ill fated sojourn at that very school proved. 

My memories of DM (nee S) are limited. She was always friendly, always polite, always sweet, and always smiling. She was smart, she worked hard, but that hard work was understated. A concept that I, in fact, have yet to master. [When I work, I make sure everybody knows it and praises me for it. When I don't work, it is equally obvious. Cannot honestly say modesty is one of my virtues.]

DM, HJ, AMA, BRT and maybe one or two others were in the same group as I was when it came to our Physics Practical class. I'd always take the opportunity to do something less boring - like stare out of the window and wish I was someplace else. Or I'd spend my time feeling superior for no apparent reason whatsoever, while the rest of them twisted wires and followed diagrams of varying complexity to create circuits. Or while they adjusted the crap out of concave and convex lenses and tried hard to figure out what a parallax error was, and how to avoid it. 

Everything was so much white noise - the boys being boisterous, the girls being boisterous, everyone chattering away as they figured out Stone Age level circuitry and the concepts of refraction and reflection. [See what I mean about the sense of superiority?] I'd tune it all out, and they'd do the experiments and draw the diagrams and know what that class was all about. 

I? I was happily at sea. 

Right up until the parallax error proved too stubborn, or the circuitry diagram involved three vertical levels that didn't translate well from 2D to 3D. Then they'd cast about hopelessly, ask the lazy person if she wanted a crack at it. 

And I'd know what to do. Every. Single. Damn. Time. 

I hated Physics. I hated that lab. I hated that class, and that school, and everybody there. There they were, all of them, trying so hard, and caring so much. I didn't care, and yet I was somehow better than they were - a fact that was consistently borne out through numerous exams I didn't study for or slept through. A fact that became evident during our 12th-grade practical exams, when I finished first and went home, oblivious to the fact that my paper had been graded on the spot, had received full marks. A fact that became evident when I cracked CLAT, and so many of them had scraped into colleges of variable mediocrity. 

"Are you in touch with our classmates?" she asked me.

Oh, hon. What do you think?