Sunday poetry: "The Ones Who Disappeared"

As I've grown older, I have become aware of three phenomena: fewer things seem tragic, more things seem funny, and fewer things feel like endings. Today's case in point is "The Ones Who Disappeared," a poem that I wrote a decade ago and offered this week for the Journal of Radical Wonder. I was immensely proud of this poem when I wrote it and still like it very much, but I no longer read it quite the same way as I did ten years ago. Back then, I thought it was quite possibly the saddest poem that I had ever written -- even the most depressing, which is a word that I hesitate to use. Now, I am not so sure. Yes, it is about people who do not live up to the traditional formula for success, and from the poem's perspective, they may have disappeared into a shadowy no-man's-land. But the poem has only one perspective, and a limited one. I have lived long enough to realize that there are more tunnels than I once acknowledged, and more lights at the end of them.

Perhaps you recall those people from the first year or two of high school. I am saying that, of course, under the assumption that ​you graduated and went on to college -- certainly the poem adopts the attitude of such a person. You entered ninth grade with a grab bag of classmates, some congregating in honors classes and on a trajectory toward a four-year university, maybe even a scholarship. Most of you stuck together for the next four years, pleasing the right grownups and making the memories typically expected of teenagers. Those were the people that you graduated alongside, the ones who wound up on your Facebook page and attended the reunions. And then, years later, you thought back on those first couple of years and realized that the cast of characters had diminished along the way. On the margins of your memories, you spotted the peers who stopped showing up at some point: the shy, the antisocial, the eccentric, the immature. They were the ones who washed out, who for whatever reason didn't finish high school. Or, at least: didn't finish your high school. Did they transfer somewhere else? Did they abandon their education completely? You never heard the true story, and very likely never asked. They were the ones who disappeared.

​Certainly, the poem takes it as a disappearance. Those peculiar classmates become an unsettling novelty for those who outlasted them; they are "conjured in asides" years later and remembered for their quirks and shortcomings: "the limp and the saved candy wrappers, / the closed guitar case and the tattered biography / leafed through each morning at the back of the gym." Those specifics are made up, but I knew many people early in high school who had similar oddities. For years, I thought of them as lost. What could their lives have amounted to if they didn't follow the path that I adhered to carefully, the one that I took for granted as the equation for success? For those of a certain middle-class persuasion, there is a fearful template for a safe and prosperous life: accolades in high school followed by acceptance to college, followed in turn by the job market and a comfortable home, all the while accompanied by a stocked refrigerator and a steadily running car. Below that brightly lit path is a shadowy world of precarious living, even if we can't say for sure what is in the shadows. It must constitute failure of some kind. "The Ones Who Disappeared" ends with a question that I intended as rhetorical at the time: "Was the road they escaped on bolder and brighter, / a better deal than for those who stayed?" At the time, my answer to that question was: of course not. Now that I have seen and understood more, I would refrain from answering the question at all.

​Perhaps their path was bolder. Perhaps it was brighter. Quentin Tarantino, who has won two Oscars for screenwriting, dropped out of high school and honed his craft by working in a video store. One of my best friends in graduate school lived on the streets in Germany as a teenager after storming out on her family; she now holds a prestigious university job in Canada. I have known thriving people who were once alcoholics, battered girlfriends, dropouts, gang members. They all survived. Did their former classmates ever wonder what happened to them? No doubt. But their early mistakes (and even later ones after that) were not the end. The world can be spectacularly cruel and spectacularly accommodating; I have met only a few people who couldn't find a footing of some kind. High school is one opportunity to find it. College is another. But some people endure through on-the-job training, through night school, through connections, through carefully honed street smarts, through the simple process of falling and pulling oneself up. "Failure liberates you," the journalist Samuel G. Freedman once wrote. Disappearance, under the right circumstances, can be another word for liberation.

I have been to one high school reunion. It was ten years after graduation, and I met the people I expected: the classmates from my walk of life, who had gone into law, medicine, academia, and, in one case, professional poker-playing. We had a fun and predictable time. None of the classmates who left after the first two years attended. I don't blame them; they had continued their journeys elsewhere. What if I met them today, after so many years? If I recognized them, I would ask for their stories. They might ask for mine, and we might astonish one another. And if they requested a sample of my writing, I might show them "The Ones Who Disappeared" and ask them to fill in the blanks.