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Old Classmate Illustration




This is a raven-haired former classmate of mine that I attended an alternative high school (for delinquents) with back in the mid 1990s. I managed to go an entire semester there (and probably only because they were much more tolerant of my rather sporadic attendance than my first high school), but, I don't remember her lasting very long before vanishing, a few weeks maybe (at a last-chance place like that, everyone, including myself, was a problem child to some degree, so classmates would get expelled, incarcerated, or just disappear off the face of the earth on a pretty regular basis.) While she looked the part of the "bad girl", she was really a nice/playful person when you got to know her better. I'd also say that she was more mature (emotionally, if not in years) and had things "together" better than a lot of us, particularly the boys, whose antics mostly just got a bemused smirk and a shake of the head from her--maybe she just left the school so she wouldn't have to suffer fools like us any longer. While we talked now-and-then, the only specific conversation between us that I can remember is her telling me, on a bus ride home, after school was over for the day, that I was probably going to end up as a hermit (not to be mean or anything, just an observation on her part about my reclusive tendencies), but, her prophecy hasn't come true yet (I just haven't been able to find an affordable, secluded cave that I like).

Sadly, I don't know her name anymore (women just love when men can't even remember who they are, right?) I hadn't thought of her in about twenty years, but, she appeared in a dream that I had on the morning of June 20, 2018, in which she lent me her yellow, long-sleeved shirt to wear, with the word "Lucky" printed on the front, since the only two T-shirts I had in the bookbag in the dream were dirty/stinky (professional hermits can't be bothered with doing laundry), so, that got me thinking about her again and I ended up drawing this picture of her that night (done in ink, graphite/colored pencil, & permanent marker). Like myself, she was Caucasian in real life, but, oddly, in my dream, she had golden brown skin, but I still knew it was her immediately.

I also made a half-arsed attempt to see if I could find her on Facebook, but, that's a rather tricky task when you have no idea who someone is to begin with. I did look up some of my other classmates at the time, whose names I do remember, in the hopes that I might find her face staring back at me from one of their friend lists, but, while some of the women I saw there looked sort of like her, I couldn't be certain, and often their personal details didn't jive with my history/location, and twenty-some years can do a lot to a person's appearance (not to mention haircuts and dye jobs). I've never been good with guessing anyone's age (and teens often look older in make-up), but I believe that she was more advanced in years than me at the time we were in school together, so, assuming that she's still alive, Miss Mystery is probably 40-ish now.

I don't know what became of her, but, wherever she is, I hope that she's doing well and was able to successfully work past whatever teenage difficulties she may have been experiencing at the time we were classmates.


After thinking about it, I ignored Elsa's advice and decided to be brave and post my drawing on a Yoopers Facebook group that I belong to (if you're not from my area, "Yoopers" refers to people, like myself, who reside in Michigan's Upper Peninsula) and asked if anybody there knew who she might be. Very quickly, I got a response from a woman who thought that she might be a "Jeannette" that she knows, and, examining said woman's Facebook page and photos, I had to agree that Jeannette really did look like an older version of the girl I remembered, plus she was about the right age to be her as well. So, I sent Jeannette a private message on Facebook Messenger to try to find out.

On the other hand, some comedians on Facebook felt that I had just drawn Linda Ronstadt or Geena Davis with black hair . . .


While I was waiting for her response, I used one of Jeannette's semi-recent photos as a still-life model, and tried to draw a younger version of her to see how that would look to me (again, done with ink, permanent marker, and graphite pencil). However, I pretty much failed. While it's not a horrible drawing, I also don't know who this is supposed to be. It certainly doesn't look like Jeannette, it's not the teenage girl I remember either, and I don't think it's anybody I know or have ever known--she's just some random 90s young woman I guess.

It ultimately didn't matter anyway, because, about a week later, on June 29th, I finally got a response from Jeannette saying that, sorry, no, she wasn't the woman I was looking for. Back to square one.


And this is sort of a Japanese manga-ish take on the mystery girl (ink, graphite/colored pencil, and permanent marker). I was just messing around here, but that's definitely the look that dream women give me when they have to share their imaginary clothing with me. Okay, not really, she was smiling and happy in my dream.


On a side note, I don't know what my unconscious brain's current fixation with clothes is about, but, I had another dream about garments (no women involved this time). I dreamt that I had somehow contracted a strange disease where I had to change my clothes every 30 minutes or unspecified bad things would happen to me. Well, I stuck to my doctor's advice, rotating my wardrobe every half an hour, until I got sick of that routine and just said the hell with it (which is probably exactly what would happen if I had to do that in real life) and left the same clothes on for hours . . . and nothing happened. Dream doctors are quacks.

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