Nobody likes to be blissfully enjoying a weekend Ratty lunch only to be met with the sight of someone with whom they have less than pleasant memories. More times than I’m willing to admit, I’ve cursed this school for being too small and side-eyed my friend when we passed a few select people. The emotions I experience vary for different opps—ranging from slight embarrassment and awkwardness to lingering anger and resentment.
My friends and I have started calling these people ghouls—a fitting name for people of the past that continue to pop up in our lives, much to our displeasure. “It’s a ghoul of the past,” we murmur, elbowing each other and giggling quietly. It was always a funny image to me, imagining our opps as ghouls that disturbed the peace of our daily lives in petty ways—pushing vases off of desks, making lights flicker.
On a cool, cloudy morning while walking to class, I was struck with a realization: I am, also, my opps’ opp. It was obvious in hindsight; why wouldn’t a mutual, unresolved conflict between two people result in bitter and awkward feelings from both parties? At the end of the day, I’m as much of an unpleasant, brief intersection in their lives as they are in mine.
At first, I wondered how many times I had been pointed out at a dining hall, whispered about in a group. But, as I thought about the actual drama that happened and tried to discern what kind of things they would say about me, the memories of what we even did to each other were fuzzy at best. Hold on, what did they say that annoyed me? What did they do that made me sigh and roll my eyes when one of my friends told me about it? Do they even remember enough about me to be talking behind my back, still? At the time, the drama had seemingly consumed my whole life, but now I could hardly remember the nitty gritty details. In two, ten, fifty years time, I won’t even remember that one of these “ghouls” made a petty comment, and I’ll only have a vague idea of what that big fight was about.
Even though I’m only a sophomore, freshman year feels like it was a lifetime ago, and the memories of why I fell out with one of my old friends are already hazy. I still feel awkward when I inevitably pass them on Thayer, at the Campus Center, or any of the unavoidable spots at Brown, but it’s not nearly as bad as when the conflict between us was fresh—when I would purposely take the longest paths to class and my clubs to avoid them.
We always focus on the fear of forgetting, on the pleasant memories slipping past us before we even realize they’re gone. But forgetting also allows us to move on from unresolved conflicts, to let go of that (sometimes petty, sometimes justified) anger toward someone and pass by them unbothered. A ghoul never haunts one place forever; it has to move on one way or another.
I barely have any recollection of the drama between my elementary school friends—or even my early high school ones, for that matter—and I certainly don’t hold the same ill will I did all those years ago. With time, eventually that sense of peaceful forgetfulness will extend to the seemingly world-shattering drama that happened last year and even the drama happening to me now.
One day, all my opps and I will be looking through the Brown yearbook—maybe across the world from each other, maybe across the street—and all we’ll think is “Oh wow, I forgot about them. Isn’t that crazy?”
Maybe someday soon I’ll see one of my opps and I won’t feel embarrassment or awkwardness or anger—just simple apathy, as if I was passing anyone else on the street.
And just as ghouls eventually fade from the living world, moving onto the afterlife, these people and I will move on from each other, no longer occupying each other’s space physically or emotionally.
