Recently, I did something I’ve really been avoiding for awhile now. I was so hesitant, not wanting to exploit myself by joining the four frillion other people who have done this already. But inevitably, I succumbed to the pressure … and created a myspace page.
I know, I know. Ick. One might ask, “Why do that when you have such a compelling blog, filled with all kinds of witty content and a respectable following of really cool people?” *tongue in cheek* Well, it was curiosity, I tell you. And damn that myspace for making people sign up in order to look at anyone’s profiles.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has googled old friends and perused Classmates, looking to see what might have happened to so-and-so from high school. It’s only natural to be curious about people we used to know. Perhaps this curiosity touches upon voyeurism in my case. I’ve always loved to people watch (in a totally non-peeping tom kind of way, I assure you), and myspace is a great place to be a little voyeuristic. To catch a glimpse of how the other half now live.
Right away, I started making “friends,” mostly people I keep in touch with on a regular basis, like my BF/MOH, BIL and a few blog friends, who also have myspace pages. But then some people from my high school started coming out of the woodwork. Like people who never really talked to me in high school all of sudden wanted to be my “friend.” OK, sure, let’s be pals, I thought. Bygones.
But then I ran into the profile of someone I never thought I’d ever talk to again. At first, I didn’t recognize her. But I saw her birthday and I remembered. Funny how something like a birth date can jog the memory. This was the profile of my best friend from elementary school. In third, fourth and fifth grades, we were solid, me and this girl. But one day, we simply stopped being friends. She was part of the group of girls who started hating me in sixth grade. Who started to make my life a living hell as we headed into junior high.
Let me take that back a bit – she never made my life a living hell. There were other girls who did that. But it all started with her and some things she said about me. At any rate, we weren’t friends anymore. And it was hurtful.
We were the kind of friends who exchanged those “best friend” broken heart pendants. We both shared an affinity for writing, and in fifth grade, she also won an award in the same writing contest. Physically, we were completely the opposite – she was short and fair-skinned, and I was tall and with sandy-blonde hair. We were both boy crazy, and often played MASH and wrote in our diaries about the older boys we liked. We made up dances to Madonna songs and tried out for the school talent show.
These are the things you do when you are 8, 9 and 10 years old. This was the kind of best friend you had in elementary school.
So I found her on myspace. All grown up. (As if I expected her to still be wearing LA Gears and Bongo jeans.) At first, I was like, there was no way we would ever be “friends” again, even if only on myspace. I could never just send her a friend request, especially after not talking for at least 15 years. I put her profile out of my mind and figured there was no way I could contact her. It’d been too long, and in looking at the details of her profile, I realized that we were probably too different. And maybe she still hated me. Who knew?
But I kept coming back to her profile. And one day, I sent her a little note. Not a friend request. Just a short message, letting her know that I had figured out who she was and that I wanted to say hello, after all these years. And lo and behind, she wrote me back a few days later, AND sent me a friend request, to boot. It was also a simple note, telling me that she did in fact remember me. Turns out that she has a five-year-old daughter who is going to the same elementary school. She is living with her parents in the same house I very vividly remember so she can finish community college in order to go away to a four-year school somewhere else.
She asked me a few follow-up questions, too. Like, how are my parents? And my brother? How am I liking Seattle? I started to write her back and realized that it has been at least 15 years since we last talked. That’s more than half of my life, and to just give her a few lines about everything that has happened to me during that period of time is kind of a staggering feeling. How can I encapsulate my life during the past 15 years in an e-mail? Even in a long-winded, “this is the story of my life” kind of e-mail, it would be difficult to fit in all the details. Then I thought I’d give her a few bullet points, like this:
-Parents finally divorced when I was a freshman in high school
-Dad remarried a couple years later
-My brother has had a hard time, getting in and out of trouble throughout the years
-He’s doing pretty well nowadays
-Went to college straight out of high school
-Majored in journalism
-Met the love of my life and moved in with him six months later
-Got engaged on the top of a mountain
-Married him seven months later
-Finally left home and headed for Seattle
-Am loving life up here, even if I am not working in my dream job yet
-Still writing as much as I can
But this style of e-mail seemed a bit impersonal, so I scratched that idea. But then I came up with a brilliant way to write her back. I’d send her the link to this post in the hopes that she’d read it, learn a little bit more about me and maybe even peruse my archives. I’ve written a lot about the things that have happened to me in the last year. And I’ve often reminisced about the past, too.
I don’t expect her to become my best friend again. But it’s a good feeling to know that it’s possible to let go of the past and move on into the future. To know that if I ran into her back home, that maybe we’d sit down with a cup of coffee and talk about our lives. The way adults do. That’s all I can hope. |
