He Wishes He Had Known Me Then
but I wasn’t worth knowing in college
A month ago, I was fortunate to be able to attend my thirty-fifth college reunion.
Please.
Do the math.
I might not be young, but I’m still pretty.
I’ve waxed rhapsodic about that reunion elsewhere on social media, in part because it was so different from past reunions, but mostly because I am such a different person.
For most of my college career, I was closeted, however transparent that closet was, in retrospect. I laughed a lot, certainly, and had wonderful friends, but was still pretty miserable. The closet precluded any intimate friendships, and even when I managed to come out, as my senior year began, body image issues stepped up and continue to preclude intimacy.
Meanwhile, many of my friends dated left and right. But that wasn’t the only reason I felt out of place. In fact, it was only in recent years that I started to shrug that collegiate imposter syndrome.
Many of my classmates were from wealthy families. Not I. Many were able to excel athletically. Not I. Many had career goals in mind from day one. Definitely not I. And the overwhelming majority were heterosexual.
When I attended my fifth year reunion in 1993, midway through my Japan sojourn and about five months before I met Hiro, I felt weird. Again, or rather, still, an imposter. And so I stopped attending reunions for a long time.
Living on the other end of the continent and, for most of my twenty years of absence, dealing with debt, the choice to not spend money on reunion and the plane tickets and the car rentals, was a convenient excuse.
But in 2013, during the worst of my anxiety treatment, one friend offered me his air miles and another friend paid for my reunion ticket. So I went.
But my medication had rendered me nearly lifeless, and the echoes of my unlikeliness remained, despite the fact that my friendships with classmates were still strong if not, in some cases, even stronger.
When I started writing my memoir in 2020, one thing became very clear. Japan had permanently changed the boy who had graduated from Williams. These paragraphs are particularly salient:
I had left the United States in 1988, a little bit afraid of graduate school, but very afraid of life as an adult gay man. The HIV-AIDS pandemic in the US made it clear to me that no one cared who died. Japan had been an escape route, a way to avoid uncertainty. I had originally envisioned just a year’s reprise, but then I had fallen in love.
In love with living on my own. In love with my fluency in a second language. In love with my ability to make the beauty in one language resonate in the other. In love with knowing that other men found me attractive.
Mistakes happened, Saginuma worst of all. Hiro reminded me, however, that my fan club of ex-lovers and ex-partners meant a lot. People liked me. They really liked me.
And I had fallen in love with Hiro, in love with our togetherness.
In the three years since I started writing with greater commitment, I also reconnected with more and more of my classmates online. More of them started to read my writing (and they liked it). Some of them even introduced me to potential agents (admittedly too early in the process for me, but I hadn’t known that then).
Some of my memories from Williams will always be painful. But I began to see how different my classmates were from the youthful avatars that remained in my mind. And I realized that I liked them. That a lot of the people I went to school with were good and kind (and heterosexual, yes, but nobody’s perfect). That they seemed to like getting to know this new, writerly me.
At reunion, I merely scrawled Brian ‘88 on my name tag. There were other Brians in my class of 500 people, sure. But I felt a new sense of belonging that extended beyond the friends I had made nearly forty years ago.
On the last day of reunion, a classmate walked up to shake my hand.
I wish I had known you when we were at Williams.
I smiled, understanding what he said for the compliment he meant it to be.
And although I didn’t say this aloud, I had a response.
No. You wouldn’t have liked me then and the miserable me wouldn’t have like you either.
But, I realized with another smile, we can get to know each other now. I think we’d both like each the current versions of each other much more.
Love your closing story. Glad I knew you then and I know you now.