The nostalgia and silence of a university reunion group

RASHA AL RAISI
Lately, my university friend Dr Mahtab has been reminiscing a lot about what she called “our childhood days in the foundation year”. And whenever I corrected her by saying that we were not children at that time, she insisted that maybe we weren’t but our innocence made it feel so.
It’s been thirty years since we joined the foundation year and Dr Mahtab stayed in touch with a few of us.
However, she was determined to change this and decided to contact someone who could help her mission, our colleague Dr Iman who’s based in the US. Dr Iman was happy to oblige and they both discussed the idea of creating a group that would include our female classmates only.
As Dr Mahtab wasn’t in touch with anyone, Dr Iman started sending messages on Facebook to our foundation year colleagues who she was in touch with inviting them to the Foundation Group that she and Dr Mahtab were creating.
I was the first to join, being a friend of both and shared the contact number of two other girls that I met with for some time before losing touch. The next day, I discovered that there were around 200 unread messages coming from the Foundation Group!
I laughed while reading through them as they were chaotic, with everyone replying to everyone, and to no one at the same time. Then came old pictures and question of “Who is she? How come I don’t remember her?” followed by: “Do you remember the physics teacher I hated very much? What was he called again?”.
The pharmacist who’s living in the UK asked wickedly if everyone still had their skin intact and nobody got the joke as our Arab genes don’t allow sagging skins. The question kept bouncing back and forth, with some admitting that they had a few lines here and there and the Kenyan physician with her ageless skin declared that she likes the phrase ‘skin intact’.
Joke wasted. This led to the suggestion of updated pictures and many were happy to post pictures of them alone and of them attending the graduation of their own children.
The oohs and ahhs of how everyone looking the same as time had never passed by them since the foundation year. And suddenly the question erupted: “Where is Rasha?”.
Well, Rasha was reading everybody’s answers like a mad scientist who’s monitoring a group in a social experiment knowing deep down that this excitement is bound to fizzle down soon for an obvious reason: we shared nothing but that one year we’d spent together. Looking at the pictures, I realised that I wasn’t in any of them as I had a different group of friends. However, I was on friendly terms with these girls as we shared many classes together and we were pleasant to each other.
For this reason, the idea of sharing an update with them occurred to me more than once, and I sat trying to compose what to say in the message. Yet it felt awkward as we had nothing in common.
Not to mention the constant bombardment of pictures of their grownup children and complaints about the challenges of raising children in the digital era made whatever I had to share feel so trivial.
So, I continued my silent observation, smiling as they deduced that Rasha is missing because she wasn’t tech-savvy after all. Eventually, the flood of exchanged messages died down and the group went quiet for almost two weeks, before someone reminded everyone not to lose touch. But life got too busy for everyone to pay heed, as expected.