It’s a strong coffee kind of Thursday. I was up into the wee hours catching up with an old friend. This is the friend whom I first spotted meandering up to our pink and blue trailer that one summer at the awkward age of 13. She had two younger brothers in tow. We had that in common. We were also both sporting the same neon bathing suit, with the sides attached, and our pasty bellies exposed. Seems it was fashion fate.
Isn’t it something how we find similar souls on this great suspended ball and then adopt them as our own? See little flecks of ourselves, our stories? Discover that our lives were meant to intertwine in a divine way? That was us, some decades ago.
And so we retold the same tales that put us into hysterics then and still do now. And we cackle, instead of giggle like we once did, as old crows cutting up over embarrassments long and better buried. Yet, somehow we still feel like gangly preteens gawking over our most horrifying memories.
It’s good to hang onto those friendships from whence you came. It’s a grateful reminder of where you’ve once been, and how you aren’t there anymore. But it’s uncanny how we can step into it for a moment, even 900 miles away, and all my fingers and toes in years gone, and see how silly those memories look on us now. We’ve outgrown it. Thank God, we’ve grown.
