The time capsule

When I was twelve years old, there was a thing called 2020 vision. It wasn’t anything to do with eye sight however, it was to do with the year 2020. I was in the final year of primary school and the idea was to bury a time capsule within the grounds of the school and for us all to return in the year 2020 to dig it up as a reunion. It was a brilliant idea in theory, especially as we were all going to different schools the following year and it was the last time some of us would even see each other again. We all put in something of ourselves into the time capsule including a cassette tape of messages to our older selves. Quite frankly, we were horrified of ever getting to the age of thirty-five as our parents were not too much older at the time.

When we buried the time capsule, we buried it on the grounds of the school and there was a map drawn and filed as to its exact position. There was a big ceremony where a TD from the Green Party came. I think that was just for publicity reasons as it was voting season and what looks better on the local paper than a TD in a hard hat holding a shovel. In reality it was the care taker Billy who dug the hole and buried the royale blue cylindrical container.

I remember the day well as I kept thinking that I would never live long enough for the time to come to dig it up. I was twelve and my body was changing and hormones were running wild. I had the idea that if the time came, I would show up with my husband and our six kids. Little did I know then that it was a wife and two dogs that I wanted. When your twelve and in that day and age you don’t verbalise those sorts of things, especially when you are unsure of what you really want.

All the years came and went. I went to the local secondary school and made a lot of new friends. Once I turned fifteen and got sick, those friends disappeared and I was alone battling an illness that no one could put their finger on me having. Two years, later I got the diagnosis of chronic migraine and fibromyalgia. Along with the diagnosis came an addiction to codeine. My life stopped. I went from doctor to doctor and took everything that was prescribed and it wasn’t until the end of an eight-week long admission when I was eighteen did, I find out I had borderline personality disorder. Then on top of that, I found out in my early twenties that I couldn’t carry a baby. I was told I had a 95% chance of miscarrying due to a blood condition. Of course I had no one but my mother by my side because I was in the closet.

When 2020 came around, I got a Facebook message from one of the girls I went to primary school with about finding the time capsule. It was literally like looking for buried treasure as the school had grown and evolved to embrace the extra kids the booming town was producing. Margaret sent me pictures of the area we had buried it in and there were prefabs in all the places I used to play football with my friends. My mind went back to being a kid again when I saw the same brickwork on the wall of the main building. I smiled at the memory of etching my initials onto one as a dare on the final day as a student there.

For a minute I was that girl again, the one everyone talked to. Then it drifted onto how easy life was when I was a kid. I didn’t fear ending up alone, living in my mother’s house. I had no indication that my parents’ marriage would crumble. I didn’t imagine ever being able to be an openly gay woman. I had no fear or worries about money and bills. I didn’t even know what a mental illness was. I was innocent…. ish.

I jumped out of my skin almost like someone getting a shock from a defibrillator when the phone buzzed. It was Margaret. She began to tell me that poor billy had sadly passed and all of the files are now digital in the school and they cannot seem to find where ‘X’ marks the spot on our buried treasure. Then covid hit making the reunion impossible.

We lost a lot the class of 1997. We never got our reunion. There was only a hand full of people who still lived near enough to attend anyways and I was embarrassed both physically and mentally to attend. When I was an inpatient getting the help I needed at the time, I found out that there was a prefab sitting on our buried treasure. Even if we could open up the canister of hope and dreams, fairy dust and unicorns, we couldn’t because of the prefab. Is it a sign? A sign telling us that we are in it for the long haul? That we would just have to be patient for a few years in wait of the prefab falling apart? Will it ever get opened in our lifetime?

I’d like to think that another twenty-three years will pass and some other teacher would walk out the door next to the brick with my initials on it with another group of thirty kids all excited to bury their very own time capsule. I would love nothing more than for them to pick the exact same spot that the class of ’97 picked. They would laugh and joke about our lame cassette tape as they would have no idea what it is or what to do with it. They could read our inspirational letters to ourselves and wonder what the hell we were thinking as technology would have come along in leaps and bounds in forty-six years. It’s a real shame to not have been able to access our buried treasure, but my hope for whoever finds it is to bring a smile to their face just as the class of ’97 smiled the day the capsule was buried.