I have been trying to reconnect with my best friend from elementary school for a few months now. She recently had a baby and we thought it would be a good time to see each other again. Life gets crazy during the school year but since I am on spring break we finally found the time to get together. I had been excited about it all week but when I got up this morning, I started feeling nervous. Would we have anything in common anymore? What if there are long moments of uncomfortable silence? What if, what if, what if?
I felt especially nervous because yesterday, as Dan and I were painting the office and listening to "This American Life," an episode titled, "Ties That Bind" came on. Ira Glass talked about the uncomfortable moment when you realize that a friendship is no longer what you thought it was. How you get together and all of a sudden you don't have very much in common. How you struggle through conversation, glancing at the clock, until it finally ends and then promise each other to "get together again soon" out of kindness and a necessity to be polite. How you know deep inside that you really aren't friends any longer and that no matter how much you want things to be the same - they just are not.
Was this a sign? I couldn't help but think that maybe I was setting myself up for the exact same kind of situation. I mean, we haven't seen each other since middle school. What made us think we would still get along? My stomach was in knots.
I don't know how it happened - if it was the first hello or after I walked into her house - but I never felt uncomfortable. We talked literally nonstop and told each other things that I only reveal to my best friends. I held her beautiful son. She breastfed. We laughed.
I wonder if there is something about growing up together that binds you forever. That somehow - by sharing secrets at eight years old it makes it easier to share them at twenty-eight. I had a flashback of us in her parent's motorhome - doors locked so that no one could hear us- talking about what it would be like to kiss a boy. We had a backpack full of pads and an electric shaver that we would one day use to shave our legs. We took all these items out and spread them across the floor and dreamed of life as adults. It seems like a whole other life...
But there we were - twenty years later - and she was holding the most perfect baby of her own. We didn't have a backpack full of "sacred" items but it somehow felt the same. There is something quite lovely about a moment where you are eight and twenty-eight - where so much changes yet so much does not.
I don't really believe that things happen for a reason. I like to think I have full control over my life. But there are moments when certain people make their way back into your life at certain times and it feels as if it were all meant to happen that way.
