Old Acquaintances

I worked in the mall at Bath & Body Works for a few years on-and-off (health permitting) before I started at Skyward.  Given that I am part of the boomerang generation (Millennials, with a mortgage-payment-size of student loan payments a month and no equity to show for it while still needing to pay for a place to live have understandably had a propensity to return home after college, saving money before jumping into a job that hopefully pays a living wage) and that this is a fairly popular stop for people in town to congregate, I ran into people I knew with some frequency.  Some recognized me.  Some did not.  With the individuals where I was certain we'd been in the same class somewhere, if the conversation didn't start immediately with a particular flavor of "well, hi!  How are you doing?" or some variant that indicated recognition, it was always a huge moment of indecision for me:  do I mention that previous relationship or not?  It was like a game of chicken, as to who was going to confirm whether we went to the same high school or even if it was worth bringing up.

Now, almost all of these were people in this weird recognition zone were people that I had gone to high school with, understanding that this job was during and after college.  These were often people I knew by that continual familiarity, people I might have talked to in class but never outside of it.  Once we were no longer forced into the same space, there was no relationship, just a memory of a face and name, with maybe a couple of small stories.

I saw someone recently that I went to high school with, now fourteen-ish years after graduation, waiting at Bromenn in the same waiting area as myself, waiting for their name to be called at the door to the lab.  This particular individual, we had gone to some of the same gatherings in high school, and we had always been friendly, but I cannot claim that we had been close.  We'd both been closer to other people that were at the party than to each other.  So, I didn't try to catch their eye, chose not to initiate conversation--I was content to read the book I had downloaded on my phone.

Relevant Meme is Relevant

I have mixed feelings about this, just as I did when I was working in the mall.  Having had a past connection doesn't mean that I'm obligated to discuss it.  When I was working, that was actually not a bad cover, because we could have the awkward "what's going on in your life?" discussion with an easy out if necessary, where I could shift it to "well, what brings you in today?" and then help them find what they're needing.  Ideally, that smooth transition kept elements from getting too awkward and otherwise removed any need for censure from my manager.  I could break out of an uncomfortable conversation or I could continue it while helping them find what they needed, depending on the situation.

But out in the wild, I don't have that safety net.  Are we, individuals with a thin connection, obliged to address it?  If so, how?  Do we have to have a conversation or maybe just a polite nod?  Now for individuals that I was closer to, a conversation is where I tend to land, feeling firmer in catching up with a stronger base to go off of.  But there are still those days where I just want to be done with my errands and recognize that it might be the same for them.  And what if I felt more of a connection to that individual than they did to me?  I mean, there's all kinds of good overthinking fodder in that three second interaction.

It's one of those weird social situations that I don't think I've ever seen the rules for.  With high school, we had a forced association, brought together by address and age.  In college, though, I chose what individuals I wanted to spend time with, which makes running into these individuals a bit easier to answer.  But maybe there were some people in college that the relationship meant more to me than it did to them or just the opposite--hard to say where that invisible line of knowing someone well enough constitutes a re-greeting.

There are people in my life that I want to reach out to again.  There are people that I'm content to let go, appreciating that they were very important in a certain part of my life but maybe aren't as prominent now, that I am content with the memory of them.  I wish I could define where this magic line is.  Hell, I'd love a graph of the relationship between how much quality time I spent with an individual vs the distance without regular communication just to have an idea of the roadmap, followed, of course, with a thorough methods section that elaborates on what counts as "quality" time.

It's messy.  It's an overthinking minefield.  I try to watch for social cues from the other individual while also making myself either open or distracted by something else as necessary.