Reunion

When I was in college, I lived in a student flat with fifteen other people. I lived in that flat for nine years (83-92), way beyond my college years, and I lived with a whole lot of fifteen other people.

It was in the city of Utrecht, on a student flat project called 'IBB' - apparently the oldest student flats in this country. It showed.

Our rooms were 3.5x3.5 square meters, we shared a kitchen cum communal room and two bathrooms. We drank a lot of alcohol, played a lot of cards and watched a lot of television. You haven't lived if you haven't seen young men cry watching 'Little House on the Prairie' on a Sunday afternoon.

There was a club on the grounds called 'Chez BB'. It took my flat mates a while to convince me to go there, but I ended up most Friday nights in there, with three glasses of beer tucked under my arm, or dancing to bad 80s disco music, falling over legless, crawling my way back to my flat and making some very bad decisions regarding my choice of men.

I've just come back from a 'reunion', organised by the people who ran the club at the time.

I had hoped to meet some of my old flat mates, find out what life has brought them, see how they are doing. I'm still in touch with the people that mattered the most at the time, but there's one or two I'd lost contact with as soon as they moved out of the flat. I was particularly interested in meeting an old fling. You can't help but wonder 'what if' and whether you'd still have that spark.

I showed up early and saw lots of familiar faces, but not many from my flat. Talked with the ones that were there for a bit and then found out that I haven't really changed much, that I'm not one for parties - that I stick to the wall, prefer sitting down and not mingling, that I'm still painfully shy and awkward and that I must have spent most of my years there doing my best NOT to get to know anybody. I left early.

My old fling didn't show.