Reunion
A weekend diary.
May 29th, 2026 4pm
I’m lying in bed. I would describe what I’m wearing but this is a safe for work substack, therefore I’ll ask you to use your imagination.
I’m in a mood as you can probably tell from that first sentence and trying to decide if I’m going to get my ass up and head to the East Village for a happy hour. I don’t want to go, but my decision to go or not will determine the rest of this post. The happy hour is to celebrate my 10 year reunion since graduating college and for the past two months I’ve been in a particular mood when it comes to the topic of reunion. Sometimes I have a detached disinterest that colors my thoughts, other days an undercurrent of melancholy. I always say that the last thing I want to do is answer questions about myself, over and over again.
All of it is pretty dramatic, but nonetheless at the end of this sentence I will get up and take a shower to start getting ready.
May 29th, 2026 6pm
I’m dressed. I look hot, but not like I tried to. That’s the motivation I needed to leave the house.
May 30th, 2026 12:50am
The makeup is off, my clothes are next, and I can’t wait to close my eyes. Tonight was nice, it’s always nicer than I thought it would be. I need to work on that.
May 31st, 2026 8:17pm
I’m lying in bed again, this time with a t-shirt and sweats. When I sat down to start this post two days ago, I thought I’d reflect on how I wasn’t looking forward to reunion and that life is very different than I thought it would be. But as of a few hours ago, my perspective expanded in a way I didn’t expect. Once again, things are always better than I think they will be.
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When I graduated college, I was 21 and not particularly looking forward to adulthood. I had an unhealthy amount of dread that is not what college graduation speeches are made of. Simultaneously, I was ready to move on from the bubble that four years of college surrounds you in. I went into the next ten years with no real plan. A lot of things happened, the world appeared to end many times, I moved around, and here I am ten years later back in New York City.
My friends asked me throughout the year if I’d show up to reunion. Ten years is big, everyone kept saying and I could feel it again, the dread that joined me on graduation day. Instead of exploring that, I used the university’s punishments towards encampments fighting for Palestinian lives, as an easy way to detach from the festivities. No way I’d support an institution that continuously disregarded its students’ wellbeing.
Feeling similarly to me, my old classmates began making alternate plans. What if we plan an alternate reunion? Would you come to that Marquita? The truth started to leak out because even with a perfectly good option in front of me, my answer still appeared to be no.
Recently, I reconnected with a college friend who lives in the neighborhood next to mine. We met up for dinner at a location of a popular Vietnamese spot. I let her choose the place because she was seven months pregnant and had a taste for Asian food. The last time I saw her was graduation and even though we’ve watched each other’s lives through social media, we had quite a bit to catch up on.
I’ve done a few of these catch ups since being home and usually when the question of how are you and what do you do comes up, I say vague things that make it seem like I have no qualms about how my life has panned out. Sometimes I hope they’ve read my writing so that my omissions are given grace, as opposed to curiosity. Other times, I’m a bit more honest depending on what faction of my life they’re from.
But when I sat in front of this friend in April, who is pregnant, a public defender with a Yale Law degree, and a husband she started dating our senior year, I realized why I didn’t want to go to reunion.
I walked home from the spot, belly full of bành mi with a sadness rising to the surface. When I listened to her talk about her life, it was normal. She’s preparing to be a mother, fighting for people to be freed from the prison industrial complex, and updating me on the odd comments people say at work. We laughed a lot. We said we would hang out again. Earlier this month we took a long walk in the park as I told her about my volunteering. She’s great, always has been. Her life is normal and instead of feeling jealous, I felt profound happiness for her. And a profound sadness for myself.
On paper, my life looked a bit lost. I moved from city to city, job to job, man to man. Lost friends and gained friends. I hated my job for a long time. Spent a lot of time trying to heal my familial trauma, wrote inconsistently, gained weight, and buried five family members, but there was no “thing” to show for all of it. When I looked at my friend, I felt sad that my steps weren’t ordered like that. College, grad school, a great job, a partner, a wedding, and a baby a few years later. I have no idea if life looks how she thought it would, but I wondered what it felt like to have things to show for the decade that has passed. All I had was a bevy of good material for a therapist and a talent for writing that I didn’t tend to enough.
It’s with that attitude that I walked into the happy hour on Friday.
I can’t remember who I saw first when I entered a dark bar with disco balls spinning at 6:30 pm, but I know what I kept hearing throughout the night,
“Hiiii!”
“It’s so good to see you!”
“You look goood!”
“Ahhh Marquita!”
Everyone was happy to see me, and I can’t lie, I was happy to see them. Celina said I was a celebrity at one point. The very thing I didn’t want to do, I did. I said how I was, described my job, my life, and my return home. People remembered things about me, and I remembered things about them. I told people how proud I am of them, how happy I was about their extra degrees, jobs, partners, and the impact they were making on the world. I meant every word I said, my pride for them outweighed any self pity present. There was a woman I never met in college there, but we talked for a while and realized we had things in common. Native New Yorkers, families we’ve had to consider the past few years, and that we lived just a fifteen minute walk away from each other. We’re going to hang out soon, I’m looking forward to it.
When the event ended my classmates asked me to get dinner, but I said I had somewhere to go. They playfully rolled their eyes and said of course you do, you’re always out, your life is so full. On the sidewalk, I said the name of a bar around the corner they should go to and Daena told me,
“I read all your writing, every single post. I never know whether to respond and tell you I read them, but it’s so good and it’s so real. I relate so much.”
It’s a simple lesson when you think about it. That life is not what you think it is. That someone is looking at you thinking that everything you are doing is so cool and important and exciting. That sometimes, maybe most times if you’re me, you are wrong about things being bad. But most importantly, there are people who are proud of me. For all the things I’ve done in the past decade. For all the ways I’ve grown up and grieved and been the best friend, family member, coworker, and stranger I can be to people.
A few hours ago, I got a text from my mother. It was a reminder that some things haven’t changed, but I responded with clarity and a boundaried love that ten years ago I didn’t think was possible.
May 31st, 2026 11:01pm
A lot has changed in a decade. I’m laying down in bed and crying as I finish this post. I think it’s because I’m actually proud of myself. It’s cliché, but I have a lot to show for a decade, the rest will come when it’s supposed to.