Sorry, Is There Absinthe Here?
Someone dug out the old graduation newspaper. Hannah, inevitably—she has a gift for locating documents from the past that expose everyone, herself included, with perfect precision. What followed was ten minutes of reading while contemplating whether the sofa was large enough to hide behind. I stand by this response entirely.
My entry: tall, dark-haired, slim. Our playboy, who charmed the girls in his own particular way.
It would have been nicer if that same charm had extended to the actual lessons—but despite reliable attendance I had apparently engineered myself into a permanent cycle of eating and talking, made structurally inescapable by a neighbor whose mere existence was enough to derail any educational intention I might occasionally have entertained. The Mac obsession gets a full paragraph. Never left without the iPod, quick to anger at any Windows apologia, documented everything Japan-related on a website that changed its entire design every two days. The apples get a mention too—I apparently brought kilos of them in my school bag and distributed them across the class in seconds. And then the sign-off: Sorry—is there absinthe here?
—apparently my go-to question in any situation, a characterisation I cannot in good conscience dispute.
There’s also a film. I edited footage from our school trip into something genuinely watchable, and it’s still up on Vimeo, which feels quietly miraculous given how much of that era has simply vanished from the internet. Some moments from that year survived because I pointed a camera at them.
Hannah’s entry is the better one. The yearbook calls her the country girl from Stotten—she drove an ancient car named Elvis, couldn’t always convince its sixty horses or the reverse gear to cooperate, and regularly had to navigate actual mud tracks to collect Angelika from wherever Angelika had gotten to. Miss Total Social. Never refused a wilderness, as long as she could locate the driveway in whatever outfit she was wearing. Call her and you’d get music playing first, because she wasn’t always picking up—a full schedule will do that.
Her listed hobbies read like a mild police report: ripping men’s clothes off, dancing with several at once, sleeping in a room with a boy in Prague (noted as a scandal, in parentheses), attempting to undress drunk men in Angelika’s bed, calling the competition at rival venues every name she could think of and immediately battling them alongside Angelika. Also: theatre. The yearbook notes she had no difficulty sharing her opinions at volume, which is a significant understatement for someone I watched run student government with the focused intensity of a small country’s prime minister. And then there were the childhood fits—sudden eruptions of pure giggling that would derail an entire social studies lesson and make the afternoon worth it. Her sign-off: Mother—why did you do this to me?
Fifteen years on, both descriptions still fit, more or less exactly. The Mac obsession has only deepened. Hannah is still operating at that same frequency somewhere. I’m not sure if that’s the most alarming or the most reassuring thing about the whole exercise.