It’s a little after 4 p.m. on Wednesday. I’m eating a mealy banana, and trying to construct a winning hook for this post.

I possess an alternate past—it is the one in which I remember instances from high school and college as the me I wish I had been. In these retouched memories, I am always significantly thinner, happy, and unconflicted. I sometimes imagine that a friend who knew me during these periods of my life (it doesn’t matter what friend, it varies…) is visiting me in my present life, and comes with a videotape of some of my best moments immortalized in VHS format. “Remember this, Kate?” She’ll ask. We pop in the tape, and I relive my teens and early 20s (which I don’t regret a moment of in this scenario).

Oh, look! There I am in the cafeteria at Urban High, eating tater tots and ready to conquer the world. I am bantering with the most eclectic group of students, and they all respect me. I don’t project neediness, so no one is repulsed, because they perceive that nothing is required of them. They can see that I am complete in and of myself. I am not, as I was in actuality, the third wheel of a 3-personed wannabe monster. I was not, as I was in actuality, amputated from my little clique seemingly without provocation in the late winter of my senior year. I did not graduate friendless, as I did in my true past.

In this imagined schematic, Gordon, and other people that I am chagrined to admit I want to impress, are also present, and they are amazed at how wonderful I was—even then. ‘Oh, why couldn’t we have known her then?’… they silently muse.

But, Wait! There I am in college on a grassy hill, or at the water front, looking svelte, in control of my destiny, unaffected and gracious. I am coveted by the young love of my life. Rewind… What did I just say? Something incredibly funny and intellectual. Look at how that beautiful, smiling boy I’m with adores me! It is not the case in my revisionist history that I will someday hear him say that He has never loved anyone like he loves the girl he met at a dance in Seattle—after one stupid song.

In this altered retroactive reality I also possess talents and skills I don’t actually have. For example, I can drive in these day dreams, Lovelorn artists have written dirges about me, but most of all, I like this person I think I could be with just a little tweaking here and there. Her mistakes are low-grade and endearing, their implications for the worst, minimal. She is so together. No slippage in the schedule of goals and achievements. She never cried when her high school crush embarrassed her during a game on the bleachers. That never happened, because this girl I could have been did not have a crush on that pedestrian thinker come Volunteer Fireman. She would never play herself that way.

I entertain these lighting flash images less and less these days. My time alone with God over the last few months has definitely reoriented my focal point. I hope to leave them behind for good. I also fear that they betray a tiny bit of insanity.

Here’s the truth. In high school I became very depressed. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back I can see that’s what I was. I was also being eaten alive by a very stealthy form of anger. I sublimated through food. I started to pick up weight. By the time I reached college I was well on my way to being fat, and may as well have been wearing a sandwich board–sized sign that read “Reject me, Please!”

I liked no fewer than 4 guys over the course of those years who felt that I was good enough to be a friend, or “sister in the Lord,” but who never considered I was worth a second glance for much else. And in much the same way I was decisively cut off by my two friends in high school, each of these friendships ended abruptly when the guys tired of me, got wind of my feelings, or met other girls to whom they wanted to declare undying love.

I try to look back at myself, as I really was then, and make my peace with the fact that I was emotionally-unkempt, and felt like a social beggar, always afraid I was going to fall, unprovoked, out of people’s good graces. I wasn’t buff and on the crew team, I couldn’t drive, I never danced seductively with anyone, and I didn’t even have the experience of being loved by a boy with unchecked, guileless passion.

What choice do I have? If ever I were presented with a tape of my past, it would be footage of an awkward, chunky girl, whose neediness was apparent to everyone. I better love that girl, though. She’s the reason I got here. And someday, when there are no traces of her left, it will be important to me to know what she meant.