Name Tag: Reunion II

I wrote Reunion the week before mine in a sort of fever-dream state. The way I wrote when I was a teenager: a song on repeat, eyes closed, listening over and over until the words just flowed out of me in a trance. I wrote by hand, in a journal, just like I used to. Then I turned the poem into a longer Substack, my first one. A few kind friends shared my essay anonymously on the Class Reunion Facebook page, and quite a few people ended up reading it. But the thing was, I hadn’t actually attended the reunion yet. Name Tag: Reunion II is what I wrote after I attended 3 days of a remarkable milestone reunion, where I saw old friends, made some new ones, and, as you’ll see in the poem, had a few conversations I won’t soon forget.