Wheneve my good friend Dan and I discuss our friends, I usually chide him for 'compartmentalizing'...you know, keep people in different compartments of your life and never letting them mix. He usually allows that I'm right and we move on.
But then I realized that I do it, too. Last night, my friend Melissa from high school imed me breaking a silence that has lasted almost five years. It's was so weird to me that here she was (well not quite here, but you know what I mean)...after all this time. What do you say when someone you've sort of written off comes back?
It's not like I wrote her off, like on purpose. It juist sort of happened over time. Especially since we both moved away from West Islip, where we grew up. But in middle school and I high school, I talked to her almost everyday on the phone, I slept over her house, I swam in her pool...it's so weird that a relationship like that was just...gone. But it's not just the relationship. It's that whole life. The growing-up teenage life in WI is gone for me. And that's ok; I've made my peace with it. I know who my friends are. They are the people whom you can talk to for hours after not having spoken in a year. They are the people who ask after your family even though they only know them through your description. They are the people who will drop everything and talk to you if you need them. And you do the same for them.
I don't have any delusions of re-creating a friendship that I used to have, but I would like Melissa in my life. My group of friends in high school was about twenty-five people. I now speak to about three of them. found out long ago which ones I had things in common with still, and sadly let go of the ones I did not. In the effort to hang on to my friends from SU and make new friends, I haven'tmaybe given enough attention to where things began. In West Islip.
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