say hello to guilt nostalgia
Lately, for some reason, I’ve been recalling moments of shame from my distant past, and feeling miserable about them. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because mentally I’m not in the best of places right now, but in any event these moments pop unbidden into my mind and force me to look at them and don’t really seem to much want to go back away again.
One of them takes me way back to the fifth grade, and to a moment when I did something shitty that I’ve never been able to forget, or ignore. I call it a moment of guilt nostalgia.
My best friend of the third and fourth grades, Rob, was a great kid. He was nice and he was thoughtful, and our favorite thing to do was stage these elaborate fictional epics with our action figures out in the yard of his house, that would go on for hours. Like William Goldman has mentioned about The Princess Bride being the best thing he ever wrote because it just came to him when telling a story to his daughters, I think those elaborate epics with my friend Rob were the best things I ever wrote, because they flowed without contrivance, like a pure exercise of the imagination.
When Rob had his birthday party in the fourth grade, it was just him and me. We rented a bunch of scummy post-apocalypse action flicks and stayed up half the night.
Enter the fifth grade, which, in the town I lived, was the first year of middle school, and thus a different school in a different part of town. Rob and I drifted apart and I didn’t see him as much because — and this was my greatest flaw as a kid — other kids latched on to me and dictated my time and my activities. These new friends marginalized Rob and capitalized all my time, and I was too dumb and too lazy to keep control of my own friends and my own time.
Here’s where things get difficult.
I hadn’t seen Rob in a while. One day, during recess or lunch time or whatever, I happened to be loitering with a group of kids, none of whom were my friends, and Rob was a few feet away playing with this techy windup car that was a fad at the time. It took the concept of windup and made it super windup, the Optimus Prime of windups. But that’s not the point. Rob was kind of a heavy kid at the time, and as he stooped down one of the kids who was not my friend but whom I was standing near made a crack about Rob. I don’t know what he said, but I know it was mean, and I know it was hurtful, because Rob turned and looked at the group I was standing near, who of course all laughed in that delightful, innocent way children do, when they see an opportunity to get a rise out of mercilessly crushing one of their fellows. And this is the part I keep reliving over and over in my mind …
I laughed too.
It was more of a confused titter. Kids around me were laughing and in my dazed, idiotic state I joined in. But I did laugh.
A laugh which choked to death in my throat when I saw the expression of hurt on Rob’s face. Not directed at me; he didn’t even look at me, which might actually have made it worse. But it was the pained look of a kid victimized by a group of his peers.
Now, here’s where the guilt comes in. It took one look at Rob’s face to know that he was hurt and that I was tittering at something like a fool when I should have really hauled back and broken the teeth of the little prick who had made the crack about my friend.
I didn’t. I didn’t even walk over to Rob and let him know that I was not one of those kids laughing cruelly at him, offer him the support of a friend.
Instead, I guiltily skulked away, ashamed at my accidental laugh and ashamed at my skulking.
Rob and I continued to drift apart, and at the end of that school year, my family uprooted and relocated three hundred miles away, and I haven’t been in contact with Rob since, though I’ve often wished to renew the contact.
Even writing about it now renews the pain and the guilt I felt at the time, and the regret that I didn’t do what a friend should do and support him.
And that, my friends, is guilt nostalgia.